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1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.3.3The Modern Seller – The 5 Skill Sets You Need for Sales Success with Today’s Customershttp://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/the-modern-seller-the-5-skill-sets-you-need-for-sales-success-with-todays-customers/
http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/the-modern-seller-the-5-skill-sets-you-need-for-sales-success-with-todays-customers/#respondTue, 26 May 2020 06:50:47 +0000http://ec2-107-23-194-159.compute-1.amazonaws.com/blog/?p=3950Amy Franko is a top sales leader and the founder of Impact Instruction Group. She has built a successful B2B career in sales with tech giants like Lenovo and IBM and after that she launched an entrepreneurial career with the training company, The impact Instruction Group. She has been named as LinkedIn 2019 Top Sales […]

]]>Amy Franko is a top sales leader and the founder of Impact Instruction Group. She has built a successful B2B career in sales with tech giants like Lenovo and IBM and after that she launched an entrepreneurial career with the training company, The impact Instruction Group. She has been named as LinkedIn 2019 Top Sales Voice, her book The Modern Seller is an Amazon bestseller and The Modern Seller is named as top sales book and highly recommended read by selling power.

Amy was featured on our Limitless Webinar series on May 05, 2020.

Watch the complete webinar:

Transcript of the webinar:

Speaker: Amy Franko

Host: Vivekanandan Sivasubramanian

Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of Limitless Webinar Series, where we bring you the top sales leaders in the industry to share their experience, strategy, best practices, and most importantly actionable tips that you can readily implement in your jobs.

Today we have an amazing guest with this. We have Amy Franko, the top sales leader and the founder of Impact Instruction Group. Amy is one of the top sales leaders. She has built a successful B2B career in sales with tech giants like Lenovo and IBM and after that she launched an entrepreneurial career with the training company, The impact Instruction Group.

She has been named as LinkedIn 2019 Top Sales Voice, her book The Modern Seller is an Amazon bestseller and The Modern Seller is named as top sales book and highly recommended read by selling power.

There are lists of accomplishments I can keep going on and on and I highly recommend you to go and visit amyfranko.com because we had a hard time figuring out what to put on to say about Amy but I believe it would be better Amy can tell a bit about our story and what being a modern seller is all about. Over to you, Amy.

Alright. Hello everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you happen to be in the world. It’s good to be here with all of you. I'm going to share my screen here. So I have a few slides for us today.

I am so excited to be here with all of you today and we are going to talk about modern selling. What does it mean to be a modern seller and modern selling is something that in my opinion is disruption proof?

There's probably not one person here myself included that isn't experiencing some type of disruption given the world events that are happening at the moment whether it is personal disruption, it's the business disruption that the concepts that we're talking about here today will apply no matter what environments we're selling into no matter what's happening outside in the world. And so taking these ideas of modern selling and I will be sharing some strategies as well that you can apply directly to your book of business if you're an entrepreneur to your overall business.

So my goal is that you walk away from our conversation here today with us some specific strategies that you can put into your book of business and I am going to have one eye on the chat here and what we'll get some help from my friends at the hippo. So I will try to answer some of these questions. If for some reason I don't get to the questions in during our conversation today the hippo team and I will answer them via email and make sure that you get The answer.

All right. So the next shared a little bit about me. So I spend my time in the world of sales and what that looks like is working with organizations who want to improve sales strategy. They want to improve the skills and the capabilities of their teams, and I also do keynote speaking most of that virtually at the moment but keynote speaking at the events and conferences.

So let's talk a little bit about what we're going to be covering here today. So this is today's conversation. I'm going to talk about some trends that are influencing buyer behavior. These are trends that are specific to what we're dealing with here at the moment, but they are also broader trends that I see regardless of what's happening in the outside world. So we're going to talk about some trends then we're going to get into the five capabilities of the modern seller. What are they why they matter and how you could use them to be a better seller today.

We're going to talk about some strategies. So as I mentioned before you will walk away with some specific strategies that you can put into your book of business against your sales book up. And then these last two bullet points, these are everything that I do. I want to make sure that I'm helping you position yourself as a leader with your prospects and clients. Our prospects and clients are looking for leadership from all of us, especially right now, but always.

So when we are able to position ourselves as that leader as that trusted advisor regardless of what product or service that you sell You are going to position yourself to win higher-value opportunities and you're going to position yourself to keep those clients for life.

We spend a lot of time learning the clients that we have and if we can grow the clients that we have and in addition add new prospects, qualified clients to our sales funnel putting those two things together that's going to help us exponentially grow our business. So that's what we're going to cover here in the next about 45 minutes or so.

So I want to get to know all of you a little bit and I'm going to ask my Hippo friends out. We have a couple of polls for you. I'd like to get to know you a little bit and then I think that I think you have another poll that you wanted to have everyone answer. So if I could get some help and see those up, that would be great. All right.

Here's the first of all I'd like to know a little bit about your primary role outside or field sales inside sales. Maybe you're running a sales team or a sales division. You might be an entrepreneur or if there's another role that you have in your organization, I would like to hear from you on that as well. So I'll give you all a minute here to put in your answers and we'll see who's here with us today.

We have a lot of people here. 40 percent of you are in outside or field sales roles, about 15 percent are in inside sales, we have sales leaders and I'll have a good mix of our entrepreneurs as well. So it's a good balance here. So thank you that that helps me to understand who's here with us today. And then I think it would be another goal that you wanted to share.

So this is just to understand if you are currently using videos or you would like to use video in the future. Alright, so do you use videos in your sales Outreach? So yes, I use it all the time extensively and or sometimes I use video. I prefer text or not currently, but I'm interested in possibly using it in the future, or not at all.

I would say for myself. I am using video into thought leadership types of situations. So I share a lot of videos on LinkedIn. I share a lot of videos via my website. I bet you have my curiosity piqued video in email as well. So I'm really curious to hear what everyone else is doing in terms of the video in your sales Outreach.

Okay, we will end the poll in a few seconds. Here are the results. 10 to 13 percent use extensively, people 29 percent sometimes people prefer text and 44 percent not directly, but they are.

So nearly 50 percent are saying we're not currently using video in our sales outreach, but we're interested in possibly using it in the future. And for those of you that either says that you use it extensively or you use it sometimes I would be really interested to hear your perspective on how it's working for you. You're welcome to put that into the chat and I'll try to try to catch as many responses and chat as I can.

So with that let's get into our conversation around Modern Selling and then I will answer questions as we go. So let's talk about some Trends first. When I give a keynote I give workshops. I spend a good amount of time talking about Trends in what is impacting the way our prospects and our customers are. What's influencing their buying being our prospects and customers even more? So today they are living in this pretty chaotic intersection of business trends. And cultural dynamics in technology trends in all of those are influencing the way in which they are going to market with their own prospects and clients.

So part of our role, excuse me because helping them to be more successful with their prospects clients through our products services expertise whatever it is that you happen to be selling. Our job is to help them make their business better and help them go to market better.

And because all of these things are changing the way in which they're going to market, it's changing their expectations of us, their expectations of us are shifting rapidly and the way in which we show up for them has to change in this was the catalyst for writing the book The Modern Seller. So I grew up in what I would consider being a traditional B2B selling environment. I sold products and services for IBM and then I also sold products and services for Lenovo. So I grew up in the technology space and then I took a pivot into entrepreneurship little over almost 13 years ago. And I started learning and developmentation and that has added to my sales toolkit if you are in entrepreneurial selling.

Some of you may be in more traditional B2B environments, some of you may be in business to consumer environments, some of you may be selling more entrepreneurially. We may touch that here a little bit. All of those experiences have helped me to what the changes I had to make to become a modern seller. This is no longer about transactional selling if we're going to grow long-term clients, if we're going to attract the best prospects we have to change the way in which we are going to Market and the modern selling skills will help us to get there.

You know things like prospecting, presenting, negotiating, closing, those skills do not go away. They are very important to our everyday selling activities, what I was starting to see through in my own selling activities and with my prospects and clients. There was a need for what I like to call the skills behind the skills.

What are the capabilities of Modern Seller?

There are five capabilities that I see when we are able to build these five capabilities it is going to make us better at our everyday selling activities. So we'll talk a little bit about that a few slides down, but I'd like to share with you here three trends that I am seeing very consistently with prospects and clients and this goes across Industries.

Accelerated ROI

So the first trend that is worth us paying attention to is what I call accelerated ROI, this is about the increasing acceleration on achieving a return on investment. So let me share a story to illustrate this point.

So this was a couple of years back I was meeting with two key decision-makers in a making client. I was meeting with the regional president. And I was meeting with the chief sales officer. And so I was part of my solution set sales training and sales consulting. So a little bit about my background there. So meeting with these two decision-makers and we had reached a point in the decision process where we had narrowed in on a solution and we were really close to finalizing the contract.

So we're in this meeting and we are talking through the ins and outs of this solution and hopefully get into contract and the regional president paused and she looked at me and she asked me this very thoughtful question. And here's what she asked me, she said Amy how soon will we see results? I need to be able to share with my CEO the results of the progress that we're going to deliver in the next 90 days.

So 1/4 is about how much time we have to really deliver something tangible whether it is a specific result or whether it is progress toward a result. Now your scenario might be a little different depending on the products and solutions that you're selling but the concept remains the same that our prospects and clients need to see a return on their investment much more quickly. They're no longer just working in annual business.

They have an annual P&L, but they aren't just working in annual business. They are working quarter to quarter. So ROI expectations, they've become much more sophisticated. They've become much more time-bound.

So in my particular situation the honest truth was I wasn't prepared to answer that question very clearly and very concisely. That was a learning point for me that I needed to be able to go back and any conversation and be able to hone in on what their top two or three ROI metrics are that they want to work toward, and how can our work together make sure that they're getting there in a tangible way and as quickly as possible.

One of the things that's happening specifically now, but I would argue that it's happening all the time when a prospect or even a client they are considering working with you or to continue working with you. They are Taking some reputational risk to do that and some social risk to do that.

So have we shown them in a way that is very specific and meaningful to them how taking the risk to do business with us or to continue to do business with us is absolutely worth the payoff is worth the return on investment? So if you think about your top five prospects or clients, do you know very clearly what their top two or three ROI expectations are, and can you read that in with all of your sales conversations with them or the pertinent sales conversations. So if you can do that, you can better stay on top of their shifting priorities quarter-to-quarter and that's going to help keep you top of mind. All right, so that's accelerated Roi.

Decision by Committee

Alright, here's the second one. The decision by committee. Buying decisions are increasingly being made by the committee and by consensus. So more decisions are requiring that consensus-building whether it's overtly or maybe it's happening behind the scenes, especially if you are selling in complex environments, maybe you are responding to RFPS pretty regularly decisions are often made by the committee and those committees will many times represent whole business units multiple stakeholders across that prospect or client so a corporate executive board, which is now part of Gartner. They do some pretty extensive research in this space. And what they were finding was the average number of decision-makers in any given engagement is 6.8.

The variety of those decision-making roles. It's becoming more complex and it's definitely moving across job function and across geography. So especially if any of you are selling globally you probably run into this quite often. So I once had an opportunity for a contract that was worth multiple millions of dollars over multiple years. It was a big deal and I had invested close to a year in building the relationships at the VP level at the Director level. This was in the technology space.

And I thought I knew all the influencers. I thought I knew all the decision-makers. So imagine my surprise and my Appointment when the prospect notified me through email nevertheless that the contract has been awarded to one of my biggest competitors. So here I was thinking I had all the right relationships. I was working in all the right business segments only to lose the opportunity to a competitor.

And what I later figured out was that the ultimate decision was going to be made by a board of directors. So I was missing this entire set of decision-makers in my particular. Unity and they had different buying criteria, different buying criteria and they placed more value on upfront price versus long term return on investment.

So my decision-makers who I was building relationships with they put more value on other factors. So we had a mismatch there and the big lesson for me was I was missing some relationships and some important places because there was this decision by committee going on within my prospect.

So If you're dealing with this, especially in complex opportunities, there's a strong chance that there is a by enroll and a potential decision-maker where you may not have a strong of a relationship as you need or you may not even know that the relationship is there that was that's what happened to me.

So our role then becomes expanding our relationship building capabilities across a prospect or client and not just within the specific departments or silos that we are used to working in. I was working specifically and it and what I needed to do was get across the business in a much more comprehensive way. So we have to stretch ourselves further into the organization and sometimes even outside of it to combat these trends of the decision by committee.

All right, last time and this is probably one that we are all experiencing right now the sharp turn. There are going to be times in your sales career where something will happen that causes an entire segment of your clients to take a sharp turn. They might even halt. So some of you may be experiencing this right now. We're specific verticals are completely sold out at the moment you may experience delays in your sales process many of us are experiencing this in our prospects and clients are taking this sharp turn to reprioritize in order to respond to what's happening outside.

So my earlier comment business trends cultural changes technology trends world events are all coming together to cause them to need to take this sharp turn. So this is disruption and we as sellers have to become very comfortable with the fact that disruption is going to continue. It may not look like the destruction that we're dealing with right now, but there will be some other disruption that we have to get comfortable with being able to operate in to build the right mindset to make sure that we have the right selling activities and that we are able to navigate that for ourselves and also for our prospects and clients.

So what this means is to combat the sharp turn looking at our books of business as there are quotas as a business. It's not just something that we're doing at that point in time, but we're looking at the holistic picture of the business and we're really taking ownership of the overall health of the business. So what you might be doing is looking at the diversification of your verticals. You might be looking at the different services and products that you're selling into how much does change.

If you're like me, I went through my entire pipeline over the last two weeks most recently to assess all of my opportunities and to see very clearly what in my pipeline is going to move toward closure, what is going to be holding pattern until further notice, what things are going to fall out entirely. So if we're looking at our quotas, our book of business like Business and assessing our opportunity is assessing our risk assessing where we have a downside and outside that's going to help us navigate these sharp turns better.

So when these disruptive times hit and they will continue to hit we are the calm confident sellers and advisors to our prospects and clients. There's a little bit of the fine Art and Science of knowing how to graciously continue or sell activities and efforts despite all these terms of halts. I believe 100% wholeheartedly that we continue to sell as trusted advisors and confident sellers but having the emotional intelligence to be able to work with our prospects and clients on where they're at and help them to navigate. Because what that's going to do is even if times are tough for some of us right now, we will be remembered positively and we will continue building those long-term successes.

Business owners look at these things as the long game. So that's the sharp turn and many of us are probably experiencing this right now. And if you have any questions or comments, I am watching the chat here. A few questions that I've seen coming in I will probably hit on a little bit later toward the end of our conversation.

Alright, so we've just talked about some trends. Let's shift the conversation a little bit to talk about the modern seller because modern sellers are able to stay ahead of these trends they're able to take the transparency on because we are looking at our territories or quotas are books of business. We're looking at them differently than other sellers right.

Definition of a modern seller

So let me type into my definition of a modern seller. This definition applies regardless of what's happening around us and what's happening in our selling environments. First of all, a modern seller is someone who was recognized as a differentiator in your client's business. You are seen as someone who makes a tangible difference to their business. You're not just selling a product. You're not just selling a service whatever your particular situation. The mission is you are seen and recognized as a difference-maker in your client's business.

Secondly the value of your product or service. It isn't fully realized without you as part of the equation: your expertise, your insights, your ability to help a prospect or client navigate their business environments. That's the value that gets attached to your product or service and that can't be separated. So the value that you bring amplifies the value of your product or service.

And then lastly for modern sellers our clients view us as strategies to their competitive advantage. We know their business so well that they see us as their competitive advantage. They can't imagine not doing business without us and that helps give us some immunity against the competition. It helps to give us some immunity against the status quo. It is a trend that I didn't touch on but one that we run into quite often a prospect, quiet as the choice between either moving forward with us or staying in their status quo is actually not making a decision to move forward because they see us as strategic to their competitive advantage. We can help them bust through their status quo and see a better vision of the future.

So as you are digesting this processing this thinking about your prospects and clients not on prospects and clients quite frankly are ready for modern sellers. Some of us only see value in the transactional business for many many reasons. We may never be able to bust out of the fender box with some prospects and clients. But part of thinking as a modern seller is taking a very strategic look at our client's sets at our key prospects and being able to make strong decisions about which ones are going to be the best fit for our business and we may still make the decision to, excuse me, we may still make the decision to have some transactional clients in our clients set.

But thinking like a modern seller, it's making intentional strategic decisions about which clients and Prospects may be transactional but which clients and Prospects are going to be the best fit for us to build long-term lifetime value to build stronger margins to build this type of relationship where we are seen as a differentiator and seen as a competitive advantage. So if you're a sales leader may be listening to this right now. Can you take your team through an exercise where you take a look at? Where do we have the opportunity to be modern sellers with our prospects and clients based on this definition or if you are someone who is in a sales role taking a look at your prospects and clients and your top 10 and really bouncing this or wing this definition against the relationships that you're building there? Lots of different ways to do that whether you are a sales leader or you are in a sales role.

So modern seller definition. So there are five capabilities that in my research as I wrote the book and in the work that I do with my clients today five capabilities that I see Rising Above the Rest that will help us to be better with our everyday selling activities.

We will be more effective. We will be more efficient. We will build a better and more profitable book of business if we build these capabilities in addition to our other sales activities.

So a modern seller it's agile, a modern seller is entrepreneurial, a modern seller is holistic, they are social and they are ambassadors.

So for the rest of our time here, I'm going to walk us through the finances and then for each of them. I'm going to give you a strategy that you cannot put into place to help you amplify these capabilities in your book of business and to help you be better at your everyday selling activities.

Look at the first one: a modern seller is agile. So agility is a Hot Topic these days. I've done a number of webinars on agility very recently and agility used to really be reserved for the sports field, but it has definitely made its way into business environments over the last decade. Lots of different definitions for agility. I Define agility as being nimble in our decision-making and being nimble and our sales process in order. To help our prospects and clients move forward.

Harvard Business Review has a great definition of learning agility, which is rapid and continuous learning from our experiences so that we can apply that learning to the next experience. If you have ever felt like you have been thrown into the deep end of the pool. You have taken out new territory. You have switched companies. You are doing something new for the first time. This is practicing agility. This is agility in practice where we have to take our past experiences and apply them to our current situation.

Our prospects and clients expect agility out of us. They expect us to be able to help them see ahead of the curve what changes are happening in the industry in their industry in our industry helping them to navigate those changes in to anticipate what's coming next album them to be more Nimble in their decision-making and the more Nimble we are with our sales process in the way in which we think and bring new ideas to the table the more valuable that we are going to be in the eyes of our prospects and clients one Hallmark of an agile seller and this is something to take away and practice whether you're a sales leader or you are an individual seller.

The ability to process a lot of information and be able to pull unique ideas and share those unique ideas with the prospect or client. And can you take a look at your top five clients? Your top five prospects? Have you shared a unique insight and original idea to help them make your business better? That is something that if you can do that, you will absolutely rise above your competitors. You will stand out in what I call the world of sameness. Our prospects and clients are looking for a way to make meaning and they need meaningful experiences with us. That is one way to do that.

Pattern Switching Analyzing

So here's another strategy. I call it pattern switching analyzing are selling patterns. And right now I would say that this is one of the most important things that we can do to build our agility, but also help us to move sales opportunities forward. So let me use myself as an example. I was going prospecting right a little while back and I really struggled to be successful to be effective and to be efficient with prospecting. And a coach sometimes needs a little bit of outside perspective to help us with this as a coach and pointed out to me that I was really in a rut of routines that can become rust very easily and I was in a rut. I was doing a lot of the same things. I was expecting better results than I was, I wasn't changing the way in which I was doing things. And what I would have realized was that my prospecting had fallen into a rut and I needed to change the environment that I needed to change my routines.

So what that meant, right? We all home office, but at the time that I was going through this what that meant was I needed to change my environment. So I had an office that I needed to go into, I put myself in my office. I did better planning with my prospecting lists. I did better planning with how I wanted to reach out to my prospects and just by doing a couple of simple tweaks and my patterns, I was able to accelerate my results. So take a look at your selling patterns. What are you doing right now? And what results are you getting from them? And if you need your sales leader to give you some coaching or maybe appear where you can work together on this. Where do you need to analyze your sales patterns and maybe change your environment or change your routines in order to accelerate your results? So this is pattern switching.

Pattern switching activates different areas of the brain, different neural Pathways and the brain so that we can prevent routines from becoming a rut. So take a look at your selling patterns and where could you make some potential changes to them? So there's a question here that I think could fit well into this agility conversation.

The best advice to sell during complex times? Some top 3 cold email calling tips?

So this is where we are very used to selling the technology using email. Now using the ways in which we are used to doing things. I'm actually finding right now that more people are agreeable to picking up the phone and having a conversation. I have made more contacts with phone prospecting in the last two or three weeks. Then I have an email. I have experienced people. My experience has been any way that people are pretty overwhelmed with email at the moment lots of different emails coming in and especially related to the pandemic that's happening but picking up the phone as a differentiator for me and you know using video email like we've been talking about early on as Hippo shared.

Different ways of going to market to get some to get attention and to be a differentiator. So if you are someone who's used to emailing, switching it up to call can help you make a better connection with people. All right, so I'm going to move on so we just talked about a modern seller being agile.

A modern seller who is entrepreneurial doesn't just see himself or herself as someone with a territory or book of business. They see themselves as the owner of that territory, the owner of that book of business. And that's a completely different way of thinking when you think like an owner you are looking at the top line of your book of business or territory. You're looking at the bottom line, you are looking at your top opportunities, you're looking at where you have And you're making decisions from a different point of view not just looking at what's right in front of you.

So sales leaders taking a look at your teams and assessing who under team has this entrepreneurial way of thinking or if you are an individual seller assessing yourself to say am I thinking and acting like an entrepreneur am I looking at my book of business as a business? Am I making decisions about where to head within that long-term view?

Entrepreneurs have one skill that really helps them Rise Above the Rest and they have the ability to create the vision. They can see a couple of years out to three years out, but then simultaneously be able to determine the steps and the steps they need to take in order to make a bridge that long-term vision.

So I have two questions here to be thinking about so as you're assessing your territory or assessing your book of business. The first question is where aren't my competitors. We are really used to thinking about where our competitors are. What if we flip that question to say, there aren't my competitors? Where are they not or you might be able to be a Trailblazer? You might be able to Pioneer your product or service with a fresh vertical or a niche within a vertical.

The second question is where is there an underserved Niche or Market that I can dominate? When we are specialists working in really saturated environments. We're working in a really saturated environment. We're used to going where everybody is but if you can identify an underserved niche, you can identify a space where your competitors aren't you can be their first.

Let me give you a quick story on that. I was conducting a workshop for some B2B Insurance Brokers. So that was the audience and after talking about this particular topic. We had someone come up to me afterward and Talk about the niche that he had found. So it's vertical was Health Care is a huge vertical lot of different sub-niches within that vertical and it's also extremely saturated but what he had found he found this small niche within a healthcare space and it was actually with nonprofit organizations that specialize in organ donation. So not a niche that i would have ever thought of but he found this niche he and it's a small Niche probably less than a hundred players in his environments in this niche, but he found the first clients in that niche and delivered so well with his products and services that he started to become known in that niche and then the other nonprofits there started to do business with him. He was first there was no one there and he was able to build his reputation. He was able to sell his products at better margins and a higher value is nonprofit stock value. They didn't just see. He's so something to think about in your own territory, your own book of business.

All right next. A modern seller is holistic. Modern seller is holistic and this ties very much to entrepreneurship. A modern seller who is holistic doesn't just see the prospect of the clients in their particular product or service. They see the whole ecosystem. We are selling our products and services within a supply chain ecosystem. We have the customers that depend on us. We also have our suppliers. In some situations we have our strategic partners. We have an entire ecosystem of people who process technology products that go into creating a successful customer experience.

So using myself again as an example when I was selling for IBM and Lenovo, I sold technology Hardware. Taking a prospect or client all the way through the sales process was in giving them that win. That was just the first phase; the next phase had to be delivering on the products the service that they were buying from us and there was an entire supply chain behind us, a global supply chain. And if there was any hitch in the supply chain, it meant that something wasn't going to be delivered on time. It may not be configured correctly and it may cause delays for the client once they have made the purchase.

So if I were just thinking about that purchase order and that win and not thinking about the supply chain behind me. I would be missing out on an entire opportunity to make sure that I was delivering the right customer experience.

So thinking again about your own prospects and clients even deals that you have it. It's white right now mapping your pre-sales and post-sales touchpoints. So pre-sales and taking them all the way through the sales process is what we tend to focus on. Post-sales touchpoints are equally as important in order to make sure that we're delivering well and it sets us up for the next opportunity.

I talked early on about making sure that we are expanding the clients that we're working with but also in addition to filling the top of that tunnel, this is the clients that we're working with and making sure that we're delivering on the right experience. So take the time with your just take a couple of deals that you're working on right now and map the post-sales touchpoints and where there might be weaknesses in the supply chain, whether it's a physical supply chain, or maybe it's a partnership supply chain if you work through the channel you work with business partners, making sure you're mapping those points looking for any weaknesses in that supply chain that you might need to shore up in order deliver the right customer experience. So this is what it means to think holistically and to apply applied supply chain thinking to your sales process into your client experience.

All right. Next a modern seller is social. So we live in a world of social media and technology. And so this conversation is not about using a specific social media tool. I really believe in the omnichannel approach to building relationships. It is thought leadership in social media. It's building relationships and being social media. It's building relationships via video via phone via email. We have a lot of options available to us. So the idea behind a modern seller being social is focusing on the right strategic relationships that we need to be building within our prospects and within our clients.

Social Capital will never have a line item on a P&L. But sellers who place a high value on strategic relationships, they know that they can create higher Social Capital. Social Capital is what is created when we focus on building the right relationships and the results that are created from those relationships. Modern sellers can build social capital and they create momentum with it that is going to help them get further into a relationship or further into a Like your client through their relationships. This modern seller is social right here helps you with that decision by committee trend that I referenced earlier. So to have a strategy has a couple of strategies in your back pocket for what you can do in your territory or your book of business.

What are the four high impact relationships?

There are four high impact relationships that you need to build in every prospect in every client opportunity. So I'm going to run through these forms and as I'm running through them. I think about your prospects and clients and where you're strong and where you perhaps have some opportunity to make some improvements with these relationships.

The first high impact relationship. These are your advocates, your advocates are your rating fans. They are the people who will leverage their social capital The Leverage their reputation to open doors for you. They may actively sponsor you for a key opportunity. They are the people that you know, that they're in your corner. You have delivered so well for them in the past that you have proven your reputation. You have proven credibility and they are now willing to open doors on your behalf.

The more advocates that you have in a relationship and a client the better off you will be. I'm thinking of a client that I've worked with for a number of years. One of my top advocates just moved on to another opportunity and in order for me to continue working for that client, I made sure that I had other advocates across the business so that I wasn't potentially at risk in this client because one Advocate had left so who are your advocates in your top prospects in your clients?

The second group is your decision-makers; these are the individuals who hold ultimate projects Authority and the decision to move forward. But I do caution here that there is very much likely a decision by committee. I had this happen to me very recently. I was giving a Zoom presentation and I had five equal committee members that I was presenting to you. And so I will absolutely have to make a decision by committee and by consensus. And I was also protecting in a virtual environment. Can we hone in on who are decision-makers are and if there is more than one where are some of the risks that we might have when it comes time to a decision to work with us?

Your next high-impact relationship is your center of influence. Centers of influence can be people or they can be organizations and what these people are organizations do they provide the right environment. They provide strategies, they provide opportunities, they provide access. So what is so if I use organizations for an example, what organizations do you belong to? You can create a high impact on individual relationships. I have about three groups that I belong to and these groups provide environments, they provide opportunities, they provide access. You can also have centers of influence within prospective clients. They are likely individuals who are helping provide the environments. They're helping you to provide access but centers of influence and advocates are not equal. Someone who is a center of influence may not be an advocate for you. And someone who may not be a center of influence, they might be an advocate for you.

The chances are good. They have some level of influence but you have to individually assess your opportunities for where you have centers of influence and where you have Advocates if you have an advocate and the center of influence who that's the same person then you have someone that you want to make sure that you are continuing to build that relationship with that is that that combination right there is priceless.

And then lastly strategic alliances. This is your fourth high-impact relationship. These are Partnerships that help create opportunities and they're often revenue-generating and mutually beneficial. So, where are your strategic Partnerships whether for me many of these exist outside of my client's sets? They might be other Consultants. They might be other organizations. But do you have a set of strategic relationships these types of relationships can help you especially when you're selling?

Are you paying attention to these relationships and building them so that when we are facing things like we're facing right now. You have those relationships in place. So assessing yourself with these for high impact relationships. All right. Last one a modern seller is an ambassador. Being a modern seller who is an ambassador. This is about building loyalty. Do ambassadors have this very unique ability to have their own unique Brands, their own unique leadership Brands where they really write as above their peers? They are seeing their industry as a go-to type of person. They have built their leadership Brands. They might be sharing thought leadership. They have a presence if you will, but they also equally espouse the values of their organization. So you are also seen as someone who is

The part within your organization and ambassadors are a bridge. They are a bridge to their prospects and clients. They are bridged back into their organization and a bridge into the community into their Industries. So who is someone and hopefully it's you who is someone that you look to that you can point to and say yes that person is someone who is an ambassador and has this unique ability to again have their own. I'm leadership Brands, but they are able to build long-term loyalty with their clients and their prospects also can see their capabilities in building long-term. Loyalty long-term loyal clients are three times more likely to buy from you. We've done so much work to build these loyal clients. If we continue to build those relationships with them. They are three times more likely to buy and they are more likely to see the value and what we bring to the table.

And not just a transaction. So how do we start building this Ambassador Factor as I like to call it, identify and track the top three differentiators to your best clients and do your best prospects? What are the three things that are most valuable to them that you can focus on and deliver on this also goes back to the trend? I mentioned earlier with Roi acceleration. These can come back into every one of your conversations and You can track these in your quarterly business reviews when you are looking at the big picture of your relationship and working together and guaranteeing. Your competitors aren't doing this. It isn't asking the question to say, what are the three things that are most important to you that you value the highest that I can deliver on so that's the first one and then the second one is to look where you can expand in your top loyal clients one of the assessments. I'm going to make it available to you.

Royalty engagement inventory and the Loyalty engagement inventory is an assessment. You can use it to track the Loyalty factor in your clients and help you identify opportunities to expand in your top loyal clients again, if we can expand in those loyal clients, they are three times more likely to buy from us. We can expand our book of business with our loyal clients while we are continuing to expand on the prospect side and putting more opportunities into the fun. It'll focus on those two things together and is going to help us.

Exponentially our book of business Alright, so we have just a couple minutes left here. I am going to look through for I have these on my phone. So pardon me while I look down at my phone. I have a couple of questions here. I'm going to try to answer one or two before we do a wrap-up and like I said anything we don't get to will make sure that we answer via email. So there's a question here. I am at the full commission on sales and full commission sales. What channels should I focus on? So I'm working on LinkedIn now, so I'm going to run on the assumption that you are full commission sales in a B2B type of environment since you are using LinkedIn, I see LinkedIn as one of the top tools that I use to build to build relationships and to do my research on prospects and do my research on clients.

So LinkedIn is absolutely one tool that I would highly recommend regardless of whether you are full commission sales, but especially if you are a B2B environment Another recommendation that I would have is taking a look at the verticals that you sell into So I myself I sell quite a bit into Professional Services. I fell in love with technology. I fell into insurance. So take a look at the verticals that you're selling into and what organizations you can align yourself with that can help you to gain access to prospects in those verticals. So that's one suggestion a second. Action is to create in your verticals. What are your top 10 to 20 prospects? That would be an ideal client for you and for each of those top 10 to 20 prospects identifying the potential decision-makers and the potential influencers so that you can then use LinkedIn to start building those relationships.

]]>http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/the-modern-seller-the-5-skill-sets-you-need-for-sales-success-with-todays-customers/feed/0How do you scale sales coaching?http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/how-do-you-scale-sales-coaching/
http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/how-do-you-scale-sales-coaching/#respondFri, 22 May 2020 06:16:49 +0000http://ec2-107-23-194-159.compute-1.amazonaws.com/blog/?p=3935Shruti Kapoor is the CEO at Wingman. Shruti enjoys working in the interface between technology solutions and business needs and has worked in leadership and business development roles. She is also a member of the Modern Sales Pros, one of the world’s largest communities for leaders in sales, operations, enablement and related disciplines. Listen to […]

]]>Shruti Kapoor is the CEO at Wingman. Shruti enjoys working in the interface between technology solutions and business needs and has worked in leadership and business development roles. She is also a member of the Modern Sales Pros, one of the world’s largest communities for leaders in sales, operations, enablement and related disciplines.

Listen to the full podcast here:

We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Subscribe to our channel for your daily dose of quality learnings and insights into the world of sales and marketing.

Summary:

Sales coaching is helping the salesperson, improving their performance as a salesperson that includes different activities. They need to do prospecting, they need to do the initial qualification and discovery process, they need to handle the deal all the way until it is closed and all other interaction processes.

The large part of sales coaching is the interaction with the customer and how do we help the salespeople get better at that interaction.

The often the sales coaching is conducted, the more the improvement in the salespeople.

The important thing that is missing in today’s sales coaching is Personalization.

In terms of peer to peer coaching, the power of sales coaching comes by using a tool that allows you to go in and listen to calls at your own time and pace and to be able to listen to anyone’s calls.

A lot of sales knowledge exists within the organization and within different salespeople heads. If they can get the tribal knowledge out and make it more democratize, the whole organization can benefit.

Sales coaching doesn’t always have to start with tools, a lot of the basic starts with making sure that the intent and the process is set right.

To become better at coaching, rather than being a mentor and providing solutions, try to get the person to dive deeper to find their own answer.

Transcript of the podcast:

Speaker: Shruti Kapoor

Host: Sanjana Murali

Sanjana: Hello everyone. Welcome to another weekly episode of Limitless Podcast, a place where we bring together global leaders in sales and marketing. My name is Sanjana and I am the host of Limitless Podcast. Today we are talking with Shruti Kapoor, CEO of Wingman. Hello Shruti. Welcome to Limitless. Shruti: Hi Sanjana. Great to be here!

Sanjana: Thank you so much for joining in today, Shruti. I’m really excited about the conversation that we’re going to have.

Shruti: Likewise

Sanjana: The topic that Shruti and I are going to talk about today is how do you scale sales coaching? I have vague knowledge about sales coaching. So like a curious student, I have prepared a list of questions that I want to ask you today. Shall we get started, Shruti?

Shruti: Absolutely! I’m very excited to bring the world of sales coaching to someone new today.

Sanjana: All right, that’s interesting. But before I start shooting my questions to you, Shruti, I’m really interested in digging into some of your background. I went through your LinkedIn profile and I saw that you have a degree in Life Sciences and went on to become an analyst at Morgan Stanley. That’s quite interesting! I want to understand a little bit about that.

Shruti: Yeah, careers are never linear paths unlike what we’d like to plan for. So I say I did my undergrad in Life Sciences and I had a strong passion and I still continue to have a strong passion for Science and Tech. And at that point, I really wanted to work in curing the world of diseases.

I worked on dengue, I worked on cancer and I soon realized that while that world was exciting one thing that I couldn’t control was, you know, the pace of the experiments. I couldn’t sing to my bacteria to get them to grow faster to give me results faster. And that kind of became a reason for me to say that I wanted more control on my destiny and on the pace of things and taught me to look at other avenues outside of vet lab research in biology. And that got me to the business world.

So I did my MBA from the Indian Institute of Management and after that, you decided that I enjoyed numbers and I enjoyed analysis and went into Morgan Stanley Investment Banking. And that was back in 2008, just before the financial crisis hit so this is in some sense my second crisis as a working professional.

Sanjana: That’s great. I think we are similar when it comes to the background. Because I did my Electrical Engineering and then on to become a business analyst. From there I became a content writer and from there I became a marketer. It’s not linear for me as well. This makes me more curious, Shruti. Did you plan to get into sales? What led you to be in the position that you are today?

Shruti: So, you know that was another series of events and career paths, Sanjana. I worked for a long time in early-stage tech investing. And given my background in technology, take investing and finance, I took up a job in fintech at a company called Payoneer, what was basically a role in helping Payoneer enter a new market which is when they were entering India, became a role of figuring out go-to-market, figuring out hiring salespeople, setting up a sales process and all of that was very new to me. I never did any of that and I think while I did that I looked at it from an outsider’s perspective as a curious student like yourself and that got me thinking about what are some of the things that could be done better in sales.

And that’s what inspired me to start Wingman and ensure that you know everybody could do better sales and more sales people could get better at the trade. I think it’s very exciting and great. And today it’s at a cusp of, it’s always been definite about humans and relationships and dealing with emotions, but I think today there is a very interesting mix of technology coming into it. Yeah, that’s what brought me here.

Sanjana: Interesting life story there, Shruti and that is totally inspiring as well. So let’s quickly jump into our discussion today. Let’s start with the basics. What is sales coaching and what is not?

Shruti: I think that’s a great question and especially the second part of it. Because a lot of times people confuse sales coaching for any activity that goes into telling a salesperson on how they could hit their quota better. All right, and given how transactional sales generally is and how numbers driven it is, the same comes into play with sales coaching which is what people often call sales coaching is really deal coaching.

All right, so as a manager, can I go in and say okay, these are the 10 deals that we should try and close and can I coach you to make sure that you close these all right, which in my mind is not sales coaching.

Sales coaching is helping a salesperson improve their performance as a salesperson and that includes across different activities. So what are the different activities that a salesperson needs to do. They need to do prospecting, they need to do the initial qualification and discovery process, they need to, if they are closer to closing the deal, they should go ahead and do the deal all the way till close.

And, of course, along the way they need to do other tasks like making sure that the CRM is up to date, making sure that they’re communicating back with other teams who might need to help in getting the deal closed. Sales coaching is helping people do each of these things better.

And of course a large part of this is the interaction with the customer and how do we help salespeople get better at that interaction and that’s kind of where a large part of the sales coaching becomes, you know coaching people on how to either write emails or how to have better phone conversations.

Sanjana: Got it and that was spot on. Sometimes managers only set aside a couple of days with sales coaching and want to maximize how much information is pushed out in that short time so that the sales rep can get back to their work which is dispel.

However, the problem is that when there is so much to learn in such a short time, most of the knowledge that sales reps get usually goes unabsorbed. So in your experience, how do teams do sales coaching?

Sanjana: That’s a great point because it’s definitely a challenge to retain and actually use any of that knowledge. I will give you a small example. Today if someone told you that you need to change the way you speak or maybe you know, somebody came and told me that I use a phrase. Maybe I had a lot of my sentences with the word right. Right? So, even if you told me that maybe five times over the next five months and if you’re only setting aside, you know, one day to coach salespeople that you’re probably doing that right? You’re probably only giving them feedback. Maybe once a month at best. I said, I’m not going to be able to change that habit, right? I will continue to use that same phrase because every time I get on a sales call, I am still going to be in that stress situation. So much is going on and I will not remember what I was told a month ago.

Unfortunately, that’s how a lot of teams do end up doing sales coaching today. And, what you pointed out was, you know, where people bring in maybe an external trainer to do sales training once a year. It’s a great event for motivating people as a great morale booster, but the impact after the 30-day period is almost zero.

The teams that are most successful and teams that are able to bring that content and that feedback loop into a more regular cycle so that people are actually able to change that behavior and keep it going throughout so that it’s not just sporadic, it’s not patchy, something that happens once a year or maybe you know once a quarter. But it’s something that actually sustained on every sales call. Yeah.

Sanjana: How can teams stand out and what’s missing in today’s sales coaching?

Shruti: So I think there are two things that are missing. One is definitely personalization. Somebody needs to give me feedback that I use the word right at the end of every sentence right now that is not going to come from doing a group session with 50 sales people where an external sales trainer is coming in talking about techniques. For that you really need to understand what are the different things that each salesperson does well or badly and see where the maximum gains are and maximum improvement is all. So personalization is definitely important when it comes to sales coaching. It has to be something that happens one-on-one apart from the group sessions.

Sanjana: Are there any tools available for that?

Shruti: Okay, so, you know, I think the first thing where it starts is in just understanding the communication that each sales rep is having. So on the email side, of course, it’s easy to review emails. What has been a challenge for the longest time is getting insights from the calls salespeople are having. That’s the problem that we solved with Wingman which is how we make it easier for both managers and the salesperson to review their own conversations and then not just have to go through call by call but get the broader trends. This a phrase or word that I use more often, you know to my going to long monologues.

Things like that make that data much easier, but we don’t just stop there. So as I said, I will take some post-mortems and great. But if they are going to happen with the frequency of once a quarter, nobody is going to change their behavior.

So what we also do at Wingman is we help people by giving them real time prompts that remind them of the good habits that they want to do or take them away from the bad things that they don’t want to do. Like you can set up a prompt for the phrase does that make sense and every time that you say that phrase and if you want to stop using it it’s going to show up and remind you it’s going to be like a punch in your face telling you, ‘Damn, I used it again’.

And that’s where it’s most effective because one you don’t need a manager to spend so much time and two, it’s happening when the context is strongest. It’s the moment when I can actually make a change or I can actually register that much more strongly versus if I was listening to that call a month later and I saw the phrase. Does that make sense?

Sanjana: So you spoke about personalized coaching and group sessions. Where does peer to peer coaching stands and how does it work?

Shruti: I think for the longest time, people who are in sales teams, unlike most of the professionals, they know which sales reps are doing well, who’s meeting quota, and who’s exceeding quota. People always been curious about what can I do to be more like that person? What are some of the good practices that I want to follow from that person?

And, I think the challenge there has been, it’s not very scalable for a salesperson to sit in on someone else’s calls regularly, and I think that’s where the power of sales coaching comes by using a tool that allows you to go in and listen to calls at leisure, at your own time and pace.

And to be able to listen to anyone’s calls, right? So people also feel hesitant in asking their peers to say, you know, can I sit in on your call? But they don’t have to feel hesitant in going to a platform and say, you know what? Let me listen to five calls of this person today. See, you know how they’re doing better. Let me just listen to five calls of my peers to see how they are handling an objection around pricing?

And, I think that peer-to-peer has a big part to play because honestly beyond a point sales managers are kind of out of the game very often. They haven’t been making calls. They don’t understand how they need to immediately respond to some of the customer questions and I think a lot of that knowledge exists within the organization and within different salespeople heads.

And, we want to help get the tribal knowledge out into the open and make it more democratized so that the whole organization can benefit from it.

Sanjana: Interesting conversation there, Shruti. I am thoroughly enjoying this. I also want to know the tools that are available for sales coaching. I mean the list of tools.

Shruti: So I think it doesn’t always have to start with tools. I think that a lot of the basics start with making sure that the intent and processes set right between the manager and the salesperson which is that you need to have a good cadence for coaching. You need to have some sort of format for saying this is what we are trying to work on. This is I think anyway of improvement and there needs to be a way to monitor whether or not that has improved.

I think where the tools help is in identifying the areas that can make the most impact if they are improved. And also in helping track whether or not they’re getting improved and the third thing where the tools can help is in getting a buy-in from everyone on what are the important things that I need to improve.

An example is how do I make sure that if I give someone feedback saying that whenever a pricing objection comes, don’t or when somebody asks for pricing in the first five minutes, don’t talk about the price. Now I can tell my sales reps that you know many million times but they might not still adopt it because it is uncomfortable.

But if I give them data and say ‘Listen, these are hundred calls where pricing was asked in the first five minutes and people gave that answer and here are a hundred calls where pricing was asked but people deferred it and said, let’s talk about it at the end. And you know in these hundred calls only 5% closures and these hundred calls 25% closures.

Everybody is going to get the buy-in because sales people fundamentally want to make money. So I think that’s kind of where the tools come in and what kind of tools, of course, Wingman is right up there. It belongs to a category called conversational intelligence and what it does is it enables people to identify these patterns, but more importantly, like I said, it also enables people to go ahead and use those patterns as coaching aids in real-time during the calls. So you need minimal external support you need minimal involvement from the manager to actually get a lot of gains going.

Sanjana: I will definitely check that out, Wingman, right?

Shruti: Thank you, Sanjana.

Sanjana: Let’s chop it up, Shruti, with just one last question that I have. What does it take to become a great sales coach?

Shruti: That’s a tough one! So, yeah, I actually, apart from my background in sales in technology and investing, I also did a certification program as a coach. Right? And this is like a general coach not specifically a sales coach. But I think there are a few things that I learned from what is important to be a good coach.

And maybe one takeaway for everyone who’s looking to implement any type of coaching in-house is not to put on the hat of being an advisor or a mentor when you’re trying to coach someone. And the difference really is if someone comes to you with a problem as a mentor, you would want to give them a solution to it.

If I tell you that I find it really challenging to build rapport and my calls you might tell me you know, why don’t you try these three things. Yeah, right and that’s useful in a very intuitive reaction. But the challenge there is that the adoption doesn’t happen.

If you were to approach the same thing as a coach, what you would do differently is you would get the person to dive deeper to find their own answers.

Maybe the answer is not to give them a suggestion on saying why don’t you talk about these three things about coronavirus or you know, these two things are about work from home to build rapport with the answer the person will come from the person saying ‘You know what when I try to build rapport, I am very self-conscious or maybe you know, I have these hesitation that I’m taking up this person’s time’ and when they start to fundamentally question and understand what their own hesitations are, they will come up one with better solutions. And they will be completely personalized to them and two they will be much more likely to stick with the suggestions.

The biggest challenge that people have as mentors as they feel that I gave such great advice and nobody followed it, and I think that’s the distinction between being a great sales coach worse than being just a good sales manager.

Sanjana: This is interesting. I personally liked this. I think it’s a wrap, Shruti. Thanks much for this lovely conversation. You sure have given us a lot to think about sales coaching and I’m looking forward to learning more from you. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today.

Shruti: Great, Sanjana. Likewise! I enjoyed the chat as well.

Sanjana: Thank you, see you again. Bye.

We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Subscribe to our channel for your daily dose of quality learnings and insights into the world of sales and marketing.

]]>http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/how-do-you-scale-sales-coaching/feed/0Go-to-Market strategy for your product’s API integrationhttp://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/go-to-market-strategy-for-your-products-api-integration/
http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/go-to-market-strategy-for-your-products-api-integration/#respondThu, 07 May 2020 10:18:29 +0000http://ec2-107-23-194-159.compute-1.amazonaws.com/blog/?p=3846Stephen is the lead product marketing manager and partnerships head at Outreach. He is Sales Hacker’s “50 Must-Know Heavy Hitters in Sales & Marketing”. Previous to Outreach, he worked as a corporate strategy manager for Precoa. Listen to the full podcast here: We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Subscribe to our […]

]]>Stephen is the lead product marketing manager and partnerships head at Outreach. He is Sales Hacker’s “50 Must-Know Heavy Hitters in Sales & Marketing”. Previous to Outreach, he worked as a corporate strategy manager for Precoa.

Listen to the full podcast here:

We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Subscribe to our channel for your daily dose of quality learnings and insights into the world of sales and marketing.

Summary

People need to go with their eyes wide open while looking for partners to integrate with. Every single partner has a different approach to supporting.

People need to have a high level of self-awareness about where they sit at the table. Either a small player or a big player, they should have their own integration.

There is a huge need for people who are using the sales engagement systems and platforms well to be more targeted. There is always this kind of discussion and balance for personalization between automation. Either end of the spectrum is probably wrong, you gotta be really balanced in your approach and understand what works.

The more you succeed at working with partners, the more those partners look at you and say, this is going to be valuable integration. I see a lot of people use this. I will help them go to the next level.

Understanding what your general kind of partner program looks like, which partner you should double down with and then from there, be very customized with the top level and you would have a marvelous script on how to work with.

You would be surprised that often people don’t really ask, they ask a lot for on the product sides. Once it comes down to go-to-market, they just say, ok great. Thanks.

Transcript of the podcast:

Speaker: Stephen Farnsworth

Host: Nikhil Premanandan

Nikhil: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Limitless Podcasts. A place where we bring together global leaders in sales and marketing. My name is Nikhil and I am the host of Limitless Podcasts. We just interviewed Stephen Farnsworth from Outreach.

Stephen is currently the Head of Partnerships at Outreach. He has held multiple positions at Outreach ranging from being an SDR transitioning into a managerial role in the sales development function. To tell you a little bit more about Outreach, Outreach is a leading sales engagement platform that has recently become a Unicorn. Before joining Outreach, Stephen was the corporate strategy manager at Precoa and he’s also currently mentoring at the Bravado.

Stephen and I talked about how partnerships are a crucial GTM strategy and how early stage businesses can leverage these partnerships. Before we dive into this conversation, this episode is brought to you by Hippo Video.

Hippo Video is the leading video engagement platform for B2B sales teams. Your prospects get a lot of mundane text based sales emails every day. That’s the reason most of your sales outreach gets ignored. So how do you stand out from the crowd, seek their attention and engage in building relationships, record a video using Hippo Video, send it to your prospects to show them you are real and that you mean business. Use Hippo Video to crush sales numbers by signing up on hippovideo.io

Next listen to this exciting episode with Stephen Farnsworth. Stephen! Welcome to the show.

Stephen: Hey, thank you. Appreciate you guys having me.

Nikhil: Thanks a lot, Stephen. So before we get into, you know, the discussion points here, we would like to understand a little bit about your career journey so far and you know, what you guys do at Outreach?

Nikhil: Yeah, happy to share more. So first up, I’ve been with Outreach for about, gosh, almost three years now. I came after doing corporate strategy for a few years at an insurance company Pacific Northwest in the U.S. Portland, Oregon. And, started to just kind of feel it. Yes to get into something a little bit faster moving that get into kind of one of these young tech companies and see if they if honestly I was at a point in my life or it could have been fun to do something really risky. It was a no kids, not much family, no real commitments yet. So I was like ‘Hey I can move across the country. I can move and see what happens. When the company decided to go crazy or box and basically it’s gone crazy. Since I joined, we have had almost 10x revenue and ARR and we will have about 4x pin-sized from an employee standpoint and that’ll again get more dramatic this year. So I came from corporate strategy and I just didn’t really understand the tech world but loved the idea of this product. When I joined Outreach, actually I was one of their first SDRs in Seattle, in their kind of headquarters. And, I didn’t know what an SDR really was. I just thought of something with sales and let’s just do it where I’m going to be using the product every day, and so I think I can get back into a more of a strategic role soon. And so I joined us an SDR ended up managing the SDR team in Seattle and then took over some kind of a more of a partner manager role for some time and then I lead partnerships now from a product standpoint from kind of product marketing, go-to market and things like Biz Dev, relationships, really anything partnerships today ends up pulling up falling out of my wheelhouse and my teams wheelhouse.

Nikhil: Awesome! Great to career path there, Stephen. So congratulations once again on becoming the Unicorn. That was great news again. And yeah, you mentioned something about having no kids and taking that risk and now becoming a father, so congratulations on that as well.

Stephen: So yeah, just a couple weeks ago. So it probably wouldn’t make that same jump safer risk now.

Nikhil: Yeah, now that you mentioned that you’ve taken up a bigger role at Outreach. And you mentioned how you’re heading the integrations department. So for a lot of viewers or a lot of listeners out there, do you recommend integrations as a GTM strategy and if that is the case then how do you choose an integration partner?

Let us say there are a lot of sass companies out there. Do you have a framework on how you choose an integration partner?

Stephen: Yes. It’s a good question. I’ll say my answer is probably very different depending on the situation. Yeah, it’s a good question. I think, I think you need to go. With your eyes wide open as you’re looking at just who you integrate with in the first place. Like I think every single partner that you could potentially choose from or you’re going to invest in is going to have a very different level of how much they’ll support you and that so for us, I think we’re a relatively small company at Outreach. I guess it’s still a small world. We’re very much a start-up the same point in time among sales tech companies. We’re actually quite large. There are many that are like real really, you know, Unicorns. I think they’re only a few that have really been dubbed. The unicorns amongst a dedicated sales tech and so for us, I mean if it’s a smaller company than us, which is generally what we see that it’s trying to integrate with us, I think what I try to help set expectations with a lot of these companies like early on as ‘hey if you’re going to integrate with Outreach first off there’s a lot of benefits to us. Like we’d like having an ecosystem around us. We like to have our customers have lots of choices and different tools that they can use that enhance their average experience and help make the Outreach usage more sticky and even even more effective.

What I’ll say is I also I’m pretty clear with, you know, most of the partners that we have that come in and request API access and want to start building into that they need to be making that decision to build that integration in the first place. Because they believe at their core that there’s a business opportunity to do that doesn’t require Outreach to do a lot. What I’m saying is ‘Hey, if we do something if Outreach is going to help you and we’re going to market with you, we’re going to sell with you, organized or whatever we’re going to develop our product with you. Like that should be great. Like that should just be kind of the cherry on top right now. If you see a business opportunity jump in do it, that’s fine. And we’re going to help and to be clear. There may be other partners in the space that make it easier for you then say. Oh, yeah, we will do XYZ and ABC based on you even deciding to partner with us. In some cases it’s an outbound motion where you’re trying to drive integration. So I get called All the Time by companies looking for us to build into them. And I think in each case there’s kind of a different value prop for solving for and I think it’s really such a long way of saying before you start the dev work, I think you should understand the level of support you’re going to get and then so that you can go into the partnership eyes wide open and what am I going to get from this company like realistically.

And then, from there you can make the decision on okay, you know what there is a compelling enough need for a compelling enough customer base that we have that makes it worthwhile for you to build this integration.

Nikhil: Exactly. Now what you said actually makes a lot of sense. Because you know that actually leads into my next question. So you have that great experience, and also, you know being there with Outreach when it was a small company, and now when Outreach has become this Unicorn, alright. So you’ve been there when Outreach was an SMB pitching together, you know partners Tech giants, like let us say Salesforce to build into Salesforce and now you are a place where there are other smaller companies who are looking to build and integrate with you, allright.

So what do you say should be the expectation from SMB who’s looking to build into Outreach. Okay, so good size of the table.

Stephen: I think I think there needs to be a high level of self-awareness and where you sit at the table. First of all, so you’re right in the earlier days for us and to be clear again we’re relatively small compared to a lot of the companies that you could integrate with. I think it’s just an awareness of where I am at the table? Am I the small player or am I the big planner?

And so for us in the earlier days, we were more often the small players. I’ll say even now we’re not far off and we’ll give you a little early preview, but we’re not far off from announcing from finalizing our integration with Microsoft Dynamics. Now Dynamics is actually a pretty small CRM as compared to Salesforce and others only with I think around three or four percent of the market, but it’s still Microsoft at the end of the day. So for us when I work with them. I will have to recognize that this is Microsoft, which is a much much much bigger like them sending a social post or something that seems very simple to me like a little tweet about our integration like that can move the needle for me. And so I need to I need to be prepared first of all, but for them not to do much but hopefully those little things that they can do useful and I needed for be prepared to do all the work.

Like you just have to again walk in and I’m going to do 95% of this and I’m going to hope that if I make that easy experience for this other much larger. It builds you a couple things that will be really useful for me inside give the same advice to all the companies that are integrating with us today. It’s a huge chance that if you’re a small little company trying to integrate with Outreach. First of all, you’re going to get a lot of face time with us, we care about you or get it. We’re going to help you and we’re going to work with you. But at the end of the day if you want to really invest from a go to market standpoint, you’re working with Outreach, most like I am going to make you do most of the work. That’s what’s going to happen. There are going to be some instances, obviously there are some exceptions there.

Maybe there’s some really compelling gap that you solved it, may be competitively we aren’t handling very well or you solve something that we really want to do in the future in which case we might double down on you and there are instances where there are small little companies where I’ve spent sleeping with the disproportionate amount of time on integrations and supporting their go-to market efforts based on the things that they’ve done.

Nikhil: So when you know, these smaller players are integrating with you and when you are integrating with bigger players out there, what do you look for, do you look for visibility or do you look for revenue as a metric? And how do you categorize these Integrations? I understood that I’ve asked you questions. But first what do you work on? Do you work on the revenue numbers that you generate from these equations or are visibility. Let’s answer that first.

Stephen: Yeah, I would say first of all it’s every single one is going to be different. I think the point is to understand the gold going in. Like they’re going to be Integrations you say this is going to be varied Revenue driven for us like this. This Microsoft Dynamics release we’re doing like we saw a market enough of a market that says we really want to move towards winning some Dynamics customers. So there is like a revenue goal attached to us doing that in the first place.

At the same point in time, it’s also very product-driven because for us we’ve long said like long been a single CRM solution just with Salesforce. And for us to be the big multibillion-dollar company we want to be, we need to be CRM agnostic and that’s something that we’re moving more towards. So I think for us I just have an understanding that for a lot of the, you know, frankly you Hippo Video. What you guys do, you guys are awesome. And the sense that there’s a huge need for people who are using sales engagement systems and platforms well to be more targeted. There’s always this kind of discussion on balance and personalization between automation and I think they’re either end of the spectrum is probably wrong. You gotta be you got to be I think we really balanced in your approach and understand what works and for us like there’s there’s a number of video vendors that have really hit the hit the stage and they’re attacking things in their own way and so for us like we don’t we probably don’t look it and integration like Hippo Video, which is a really well done integration and say oh I expect that. I’m going to see a certain amount of revenue come from that. For me it’s just the fact that you’re solving friends a customer needs in the first place.

But on the flip side you guys met if you decide to double down say, you know what there’s a few sales engagement platforms out there and we think that Outreach is our most compelling opportunity. I probably would look and say, you know, I want to have a neither revenue goal or like a number of user goals within a certain period of time that says I’ve hit this I’ve not only built-in integration for outreach which can be an expensive thing to do from a Dev resource allocation. But I’ve also made sure that I’ve aligned my go-to-market efforts whether Outreach is going to help me or not I’m going to do so internally so that I can actually capture this market and that’s I don’t think you guys are doing a good job with that and that’s again it’s the more you are succeeded that and this is kind of a chicken before the egg, sorry about that. Like the more you succeed at working with Outreach customers the more that Outreach is going to look at you and say this seems like a valuable integration, I see a lot of people use this, you know, I will help them go to the next level.

Nikhil: That leads into my next question. Do you have separate teams which work on these Revenue Integrations and Visibility Integrations, or is it the same team that works on them as well.

Stephen: Yeah, I would say first of all there are a lot of companies out there that are very like integration driven in terms of how they build products. Like integration platforms as a service, for example, you know, the Zappiers and Trace whole those areas of the world like their gag, right? That’s all they do. So their teams, I’m sure they have very nuanced product teams that have goals based on that. For us generally when we’re going to build Integrations, we’re going to focus on two things one is we may just have a product initiative that has nothing to do with integrations. But because we’re solving some gap that means we ought to align with some other companies that will help us in that capacity. And so we’re going with our product team. It’s generally just a regular old product team with its own initiative that doesn’t typically work with Integrations, but they get involved, I get involved because it’s something where we think a partner can help.

On the flip side though, there are times when there are for us, we really tried not to build like a single integration. We try really hard to build with anything in the APIs framework that allows us to extend some capability with an Outreach that then multiple parties can access and for us that’s I think a focus for us is that we have a team. Oops, there goes my life. We have a team that focuses heavily on just the kind of extending the platform PIR or API.

Nikhil: That brings me to my next question now that we have understood what works and you know how to build an actual creation framework and you know get those equations built into the system. We would like to know a little bit more about how you plan a GTM strategy with those Partners. So how let us say we are a star. And we have built into you know an outreach. What would be your advice to and how do we look at this particular strategy attitude? And once the integration is bit how to take it apart?

Stephen: Yeah. It’s a great question. I think that whether you know, whether there’s a published like tearing system like a level system, what type of partner you are externally you may have something where it’s clear as day where you fall in like the priorities of the partner. In other instances, it may not be something that’s public but you should be sure that in the background internally. There is a company that’s the company that you’re reintegrated into its kind of looks at you and levels. Out against other partners in general and so they I would I would advise that if you don’t have this you understand what it is that matters to you from a partner standpoint and then have an essentially a template of what you would do for each level of partner.

So for us, I think we have a launch I think, you know pretty by now. I believe I’ve launched in my couple years in this row like I we’ve launched probably 60 Integrations and being that in that level of integration, there are a lot of them where their we have a very templated pretty easy launch process that we can do over and over again for some of the smaller partners that were again it’s very useful for them and it doesn’t take a lot of resources from us. That’s perfect.

Our annual user conference is in April April 7th to 9th. It’s called Unleash that conference. There are big announcements, big product announcements and product product key notes that we are probably not going to air a lot of our Integrations in that keynote. Like just only a couple that maybe really move the needle or really matter to us what we talked about and I think it’s just understanding again understanding what your kind of general partner program looks like which partners you should double down with and then from there be very customized with panda at the top level and then the rest you need to have more prescription to how to work with and so any partners I do think even some partners are very small. Can a very small tear the very kind of young startups that work with us.

I think a great thing to do and sometimes it can be a little bit annoying frankly, but just asking and asking us what are the options that are available? Like I’ll take you through it you’d be surprised at how often people don’t really ask and they just maybe they ask for a lot of the product side. But once it comes out of the go-to-market, they just kind of say okay great, thanks like and and that’s it and knowing, for me, that’s fine.

Because again, I don’t need to spend a whole my time on these sorts of things but everyone saw but everyone says like what we would have done more like we could have done a social post. We could have you done some blog posts or something we would have we would have amplified. There’s there’s a lot more willing to do if you make it easy for us.

Nikhil: Awesome. Now that you mentioned that you have a small template that takes it to your partners. Can you actually get into that a little bit more just to understand? You know, what are the steps that you as Outreach does with GTM plan with the partners.

Stephen: So I mean I would say that we’re not anything special. Like I would say that we found very descriptive a lot of others do and that can be as simple as we probably aren’t going to do a lot of the again the lift on are for a lot of smaller integrations.

But you can imagine things like a blog post, social post, customer email newsletter inclusions. We’re going to, you know, we don’t do this often, but you can do an email notification of some sort. You could announce it at a conference that we’re occasionally doing case studies or webinars were partners and even something like the webinar.

We’ve done this sense of simple, but we’ve made a lot of progress in her partner marketing efforts just by understanding our webinar process and we have very clear processes of hey, there are certain types of partners that Outreach will host on our webinar and we have a very clear list of I process and expectations if you do that on the very clear process for here’s what you’re like what you’re going to do. And here’s what Outreach is willing to do and then it’s up to the partner to self-select in because they’re willing to do that or self-select out because it’s not something they’re willing to do and so I would say that really if you were to look online I’m sure any how to launch a product forget any sort of encouraged. What’s a product marketing launch process? That process is going to be probably 95% the same as us.

I do think there’s some interesting things you can do with LinkedIn and some social platforms today and that I think our own little bit more unique and certain companies do a really good job at utilizing some of these newer channels that launch products.

Nikhil: Awesome. So now that we understand these partnerships work, you have a few other panels on how to take these partnerships to market and you give these amazing options depending on the size and scale of the company they can actually choose. Now, do you have a few examples where some of these partnerships work and could you take us through some of those examples?

Stephen: Yeah. So here’s our first say. I think a really important thing going to this is understanding who the person is that you’re working with the other company understanding what their motivation is. For me I often work with lots of you know, I’ll work just based on my wall work with product leadership at a company or the BD leadership or the marking these you could be very different in terms of who I work with and I think generally when you have more segmented you understand where people are coming from. For me and for Outreach like there is and there’s a huge ecosystem or a huge group of people that you’re working with your general appointment back to me somehow and for me, it’s important like I roll up on the market like I’m under marketing and I work really heavily with products. I’ve said I might be internally that reach out.

Of marketing and so for me I’m less worried about specific opportunities that come in like Revenue opportunities to come in like maybe a BD manager would like were there they care a lot about like the specific opportunities that can drive from Partners now do I track that and do I like those? Absolutely, but for me I care a lot about how big of a marketing opportunity this is. I guess this is a company’s brand that if I’m aligned with I will get more awareness. Or from me and from probably saying I care a lot about what the customer needs and wants and has asked for and so we build in focus our operations there. So sorry. I don’t know if I had answered a question. For me I know what my motivations are. And so I think getting on the same page is very helpful with these Partners.

Nikhil: Yeah, it was actually perfect. So you always have to look at integration opportunities as a BD of opportunity and that is what a lot of businesses lack. What I feel about partners is that there are a lot of companies that build these great partnerships, but they lack that acumen to take it to the market.

So, understanding that every integration acts like a BD opportunity as separately which can generate its own revenue stream is actually a great advice. So thanks Stephen for that brings us to a close of this podcast. So before I let you go just want to understand if our listeners want to reach up to you, what is the best way to reach out?

Stephen: Yeah, actually I think generally the end of the season, hey follow me on LinkedIn. But yeah, but go ahead and take me on the kids were actually really bad with my LinkedIn messages and maniacal about my email and so I would say feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if there’s something for us to connect on deeper get see if you get a bunch of you my email via LinkedIn and then that’s the way they actually think everyone’s An email or trade agreement but start start with LinkedIn.

Nikhil: Awesome. And the last question. What are your goals for 2020. Personally, I understand you know that you’ve got a great development in your family. But what about your professional goals for 2020?

Stephen: Yeah. Keep my baby alive on the personal side. That’s I think that’s that’s next. Yeah professionally. I think we really got a lucky start where we have an ecosystem that’s growing around. A lot of interest from a lot of companies for working with us. And I don’t know if we’ve done a great job yet really scaling some of our efforts and in part of that means honestly creating barriers to working with us so that only the right companies are coming through the door. My 2020 goals are very much focused on how do I scale myself? How do I scale my team to focus on the things that matter.

Nikhil: Excellent goals for 2020, Stephen. Thanks a lot for joining us on another episode of Limitless Podcast. And I’ll see you soon.

Stephen: Thank you.

Nikhil: That was Stephen Farnsworth from Outreach. Interesting episode there and really good insights given by Stephen. There are some of the key points that I really liked were, you know, you have to find out about your GTM opportunities available before integrating with your partner because these GTM opportunities help your platform as well. Align your goals with the level of support that is offered before integrating with a partner.

If you are in SMB integrating into a big Market or an enterprise product be prepared to do all the heavy lifting in terms of go to market strategy and promotions. The value delivered to the partner customers is directly proportional to the support offered by them. And always you get integration of opportunities as business development opportunities. Thank you everyone for listening.

We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Subscribe to our channel for your daily dose of quality learnings and insights into the world of sales and marketing.

]]>http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/go-to-market-strategy-for-your-products-api-integration/feed/0Making Salesforce adoption easy for your sales teamshttp://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/making-salesforce-adoption-easy-for-your-sales-teams-webinar/
http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/making-salesforce-adoption-easy-for-your-sales-teams-webinar/#respondWed, 06 May 2020 05:58:43 +0000http://ec2-107-23-194-159.compute-1.amazonaws.com/blog/?p=3841Amy Oplinger Singh is a senior consultant at the Crevalle Group. She is an expert in Salesforce end-user training. She has a wealth of experience across different industries of different sizes, and she is also one of the well-known speakers of Dreamforce. Needless to say, she is the best person to talk about today’s topic […]

]]>Amy Oplinger Singh is a senior consultant at the Crevalle Group. She is an expert in Salesforce end-user training. She has a wealth of experience across different industries of different sizes, and she is also one of the well-known speakers of Dreamforce. Needless to say, she is the best person to talk about today’s topic – Making Salesforce adoption easy for your sales teams.

Amy was featured on our Limitless Webinar series on Mar 24, 2020.

Watch the complete webinar:

Transcript of the webinar:

Speaker: Amy Oplinger
Host: Vivekanandan Sivasubramanian

Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of Limitless Webinar Series where we bring you the top sales leaders in the industry to share their experience, strategy, best practices, and most importantly actionable inputs that you can readily implement in your jobs.

Today, we have an amazing guest with us, Amy Oplinger Singh. She's a senior consultant at the Crevalle Group. She is an expert in Salesforce end-user training. She has a wealth of experience across different industries of different sizes, and she is also one of the well-known speakers of Dreamforce. Needless to say, she is the best person to talk about today’s topic - Making Salesforce adoption easy for your sales teams.

Hi everyone. First of all, we're going to be talking today about one of my favorite topics and if you are all using Salesforce, this is really an ongoing issue with Salesforce and that is user adoption. Today, I think that what basically had happened to me over the past five years and my sales career and Salesforce career and then my experience as an end-user has contributed to making adoption my kind of flag for my Salesforce career.

How can we make Salesforce easy?

So today we're going to talk about how you can make Salesforce easy for your teams, how you can utilize your Internal Champions that will help you with adoption, using third-party apps, or going to the app exchange for help when you can't do it on your own.

The importance of ongoing training and how it relates to adoption. And I will have some questions and answers at the end. So feel free to chat any questions that you might have in the Q and A section. I think if you have something while I'm talking I will answer those at the end.

A little background on me. I was in sales for many years that that was my career prior to entering sales for and as an account executive I used a lot of different things and most of them were all the same until I started using Salesforce and I noticed that it just kind of worked for me and I was able to really have a better grasp on my particular book of accounts. And it shows in my commission checks at the end of the month and when I first started using Salesforce, I became king of the put the child at my company because I was blowing away the metrics and everyone wanted to know my secret what I was doing and I was simply the one salesperson that would have using Salesforce in that my notebook because you know in the time of when we all had a binder to go through our book of business.

So I became an internal champion and we'll talk about the importance of that later, but It was that experience that I had once I started my career and Salesforce, I made a total switch from are doozer to behind the scene where I can really focus on imparting how important it is to build from the end-users perspective.

A lot of projects that I've worked on oftentimes the very first line I used to get cut from the training. The manager doesn't see the point of it. They see so forth of the reporting tool only and you know, just put it in we don't need to train people will figure it out and inevitably sitting there calling me six months later saying, oh we spent all this money on Salesforce and nobody's using it what point nobody knows how to use it and I remind them, hey, you just let me come train them. You basically bought a Ferrari and let me walk out of the door with the keys.

So I like to kind of tell that story to everyone that I meet that wants to cut out training. That's fine. You'll be there, get trains now or you'll call me six months from now and nobody's using it. So it's very important that you have this body in from the top down that managers understand that they'll force is a tool of course for recording. However, if you don't make it easy for the end-users to use it to get in there and spend the day giving you the information that you need for you to report what good it is.

So I like to work with the visitors and certainly get the requirements that the managers need and the metrics they need to report on a lot of times, unhealthy companies work those metrics out. Salesforce is a wonderful tool, but you need to have a really good process of these and In order to translate to great with a dashboard that the managers can make decisions off of, what I like to do is I like to sit with the actual person that is entering the data of the salesperson. And what I can make it easier for them oftentimes in a project. This is overlooked.

To go to the engine room. Your data will come again lining the business processes with Salesforce functionality is something else that I see kind of lacking a lot in Salesforce implementations when I come in after they've already been using Salesforce for a period of time.

The business doesn't really happen process down. So it's hard for an implementer to translate that into Salesforce when they don't know the business doesn't know themselves what they want to be automated and what process they have in place and so forth. So a lot of my job as a consultant is helping businesses determine the process, kind of helping the parents get to the real need of what they're getting to. And this streamlining the prophecy and me having their first knowledge being able to translate that into Salesforce trickles down and helps the end-user have a seamless experience.

You want them, of course, in Salesforce for the minimum time. You don't want somebody spending the majority of their day an hour-and-a-half updating their accounts and their opportunities and things like that because your process isn't in order. So there are a lot of things that need to happen at a foundational level in order for adoption to occur if that makes sense.

Once we get the processes ironed out for the business and we oughta get Salesforce functionality worked in with those processes a lot of opportunities for automation might occur and the importance for me and sitting down with an end-user cannot be overstated enough.

I often find ways to automate very basic fields that people are just kind of updating based on a status based on this based on that, not knowing that there could have been automation in place that would have saved the salesperson another 5-10 minutes of just filling in values for the field.

Once we are building with the end-user in mind, all of these things will kind of come into place. You got your processes in order. You have a consultant there that can translate your thoughts of these into Salesforce functionality and your consultant is working with the end-users to find out what they do their job and how they can automate certain parts of the end-users job.

What is an Adoption Dashboard?

So that management still gets the data that it needs. But your salespeople can be what they're there for and that's the self. Oftentimes KPI measurements for sales targets are in place. However, the management when they get Salesforce might not have an idea of adoption. So just the same way that you can measure But you want to put on target for yourself people you can set a target for adoption and your implementer your admin can set up an adoption dashboard when you're trying to impart to your end-users important Salesforce with is.

You can take a look at this adoption dashboard and keep track of the people that are using the system you can see very quickly and easily where Salesforce is working, who is not working it, and so forth. So I found that implementing an adoption dashboard even something very simple as who lost in the last week. It can be very helpful in motivating especially for salespeople. We're used to those metrics and used to being measured. We want to be number one. So if I can, you know talk to my coworker and say hey Sarah look at me. I'm number one for a long. Since last week. You can kind of make it fun for the salespeople to tell us all that our salesperson nature would like to be measured.

You have your adoption dashboard. Your processes are great. You have all this great functionality built-in Salesforce. Now, it's time to take a one step further, your salespeople are entering data you need as a manager to see The KPIs and where your sales are, where the opportunities are and everything so building dashboards and reports will really help again. Not only with the managers to make those important for casting decisions. But also with the sales reps. Like I just mentioned with the adoption dashboard, we want to know where we're at. We want to know how far we are from our goal. We want to know where we stand in relation to the other sales. And probably how much are fish and chips going to be based on our month?

So these dashboards and reports are very important for adoption. One particular project that I was on. They really didn't have much in the way of dashboards and reports. They didn't really have much in the way of user adoption. This is why I was there to kind of help turn that around. And what I found was a lot of the reps had been there for some time and had their way of doing things and their way of keeping track of things and they really didn't care to see a dashboard. It was filled with pork.

Well, one of the things I asked management to do was to run their stand-ups using dashboards and reports and one particular sales rep who was always number one. He was very good. I didn't think they knew about it and was really upset that somebody else got the attention in the meeting and the manager quite frankly told him, well, your opportunities are available for summer running these meetings based on this report. So get your stuff in Salesforce.

That was very efficient. A very effective very efficient way of bolstering user adoption at least by one but that getting that manager buy-in is another point. We'll talk about the next very important thing to have a management group that talks the talk and walks the walk basically. The managers don't care about what's in Salesforce if they don't have any good reports and dashboards and they're not questioning where the numbers are coming from. Your salespeople aren't going to use it.

So my next tip is to find those internal Champions number one being buy-in from the top down if they are very effective to have like in the example I just talked about running your stand-up dashboards and reports. People like to be recognized. We all have a peacock, we want to be known. So having that buy-in by managers is very important and will draw help drive adoption. I've seen it time and time again.

Not only is it important to identify those key stakeholders? Hours of the top-down you'll also find people amongst your employees that are using Salesforce that really love it. I was one of those people I was what they call a power user. I love Salesforce, it helped me immensely in my job and eventually led to a career choice because I loved it so much and I wanted to help other salespeople other business people understand how powerful sales force can be when it's used and set up correctly.

So finding those Internal Champions will not only help you as a team, if you were the technical it team or sales, of course, admin at your company and you're struggling with adoption. You've got management by now, I would implore you to go around your company, talk to people, sit with them and learn how they do their job and I'm sure that during one of those conversations you'll find somebody that really enjoys they'll for entering the date of whatever it might be. They might really get a lot of joy out of their job and their sales were part of their job. Not only that but they're good at it and they're consistent and they see the tool for the power that it is.

So those are the people that you want to identify what I would recommend and is that you make a power user for each group in your company? And this will help not only kind of increase adoption, but it will relieve your ICP from having to constantly train you're giving them you're teaching them to fish as the saying goes. So you're training these power users to kind of be extensions of your ICP with regards to Salesforce and how to use it.

Then making sure that you have that strong admin team is my final point for finding is internal Champions. You want someone you want people on your team that is kind of excited about Salesforce and what it can do for the company, but you also want to be able to have them empowered. They shouldn't be just order takers. They should care for Salesforce. We have the ability to care for the Salesforce org and roadmap it so that your business can grow and for management to trust that team to put the right changes in place. They will be running the system. They will be driving the adoption with the management by it. So that's a very important part of increasing adoption.

Next, I want to talk about using third-party apps and app exchange products. There are a lot of great things that you can build in Salesforce for the typical admin team that I see they're overwhelmed with requests, dev requests, and a lot of complex requirements often come with.

And what I like to let companies know that my clients know is that oftentimes when you're faced with something that you wanted to do that. It doesn't go out of the box. There's an app for that. So be smart about your time when it comes to making changes and dedicating dev resources to build something that you might already have. There might already be a solution for, could be free, could be paid whether it be a third party app or app exchange product Hippo Videos is one of those products for installing the demo at the top of the call. So there are a lot of answers to your Salesforce problems so that you can save your precious dev resources for really making your internal or the best. B-but my advice there is just don't reinvent.

The dev resources and admin resources are really kind of pushed to the limit in most enterprises that I work with and Something that they're spending months and months and months of development time or hiring outside consulting firms off. There's already an app on the app exchange system that handles that requirement. So I would advise you all to really kind of go on to the app exchange and research what's available for your particular edition of Salesforce and make sure that you're not burning dollars a burning time kind of reinventing the wheel.

Finally, ongoing training is really the key to adoption success. You can't Implement Salesforce and have a trainer come in and do a two-hour guide two hours for and expect the option to be a hundred percent. It doesn't work like that. Salesforce is constantly changing your air force development team and is constantly making updates. While they're making the updates, they might not have the time and resources to go through and update the company on everything. So ongoing training and building that into your mindset are really really important for adoption. There are many ways that you can accomplish this number one out of the box is in-app guidance for Salesforce. So in guides, you don't know you can be configured by your Salesforce development team giving your end-user kind of pointers as to what they're doing on the screen. There are also several third-party apps that do the same kind of thing. A little bit more robustly than the out-of-the-box solution. So again, if you want to kind of spend some time researching what's already available for you on the app exchange saves a lot of time.

Training videos. Everyone learns differently. I love to train people because I was there, I was the end-user and I was frustrated with the way things worked. So I get it and I know people the last thing is built for some of us to do is spend a lot of time answering what they feel is unnecessary data. How do I get from here to there? I just want to close this opportunity. Why isn't it letting me? So this is where I found training videos are really helpful. For companies to build a repository of training videos that can run people through the process and so you're not putting in a request for someone-on-one training so that you're not Fielding the same request over and over and over. How do I do this? How do I do this? When you onboard an employee, you have this repository of training videos that you can give them that they can refer to any kind of make them more self-sufficient. So I love training videos for that reason.

Also, I think people learn in different ways. Some people love PowerPoint. I don't. I hate powerfully if I don't learn that way I learn best by doing. So one of my favorite ways to implement a training program is one particular training project. I was on for more than seven months. Where I lived was the same company I referred to earlier they really had no adoption whatsoever. No, no resources really to trade. So I just had lunch and learned every week. I said, you know 12 to 2. I'm going to be in this conference room. There's going to be snacks and come learn about this great new way to do whatever and step 4, so I would highly recommend Implementing that don't have to be every week depending on the availability of your team, but I would definitely suggest once a month for the lunch and learn or another program that I like to have companies instill is office hours. If an admin will have one hour two hours a week that somebody can come and ask them anything. This is not only helpful for the end-user, but this is also helpful for the asset. When I Implement office hours, I can see the issues that are coming in, and oftentimes, this will kind of be a really good insight to your org. And what's not working for people. If you're getting the same request over and over from multiple people in your company, you as a developer, going to look at that and say wait for a minute something's not matching here. We've trained on this, you know the process they're good Salesforce users but for some reason, we keep getting this one kind of request over and over during off house.

So it's helpful for you and your team to implement the things with the training videos, lunch and learn at the office hours to be open to your end-users what they're experiencing so that you can address those issues. This is all going to add up to them using the system or they're going to feel heard and they're going to feel appreciated and they're going to want to do what's asked of them. This has been my experience for the last five years. I had a very large training project that was initially going to be visible and the project sponsor said that you know some of your thoughts on this occasion, but what do you think? Because things will come up. Be open and listen to your end-users and make them also accountable.

I have my presentation today. I am open to questions. I do have a list of questions that I want to read and see if we can get these answered.

Guidelines for Change management communication

Prasanna wants to know any guidelines and change management communication with end-users. For example, there is a change in process, how a lead process maybe adding a statement that has or there is a change in how an activity is reported.

Change management is very important. You can't epic fail for a team. You can't just go in and change people's jobs and not tell them right. So most companies have a release schedule. They have good communication around that oftentimes when a release happens, a communication or a lunch and learn takes place. That's what I would recommend that the interested or the affected parties join the lunch and learn. That's a great way to communicate change management. Also having documentation. I can't stress enough the importance of having your or documented changing request documents and having a repository for that. Not only will it help your internal team if any changes come by its personnel changes the next Salesforce member that comes on board will be up to speed and be able to refer to the documentation and understand what processes are already in place and things like that.

The next question is on how to focus on and how to roll out new features and enhancements?

I think that depending again on your particular change management strategy, for example, will take lightning transitioning people from classic to lightning is heavy and a lot of the projects that I work on now. And what we recommend is a pilot group and then a phased rollout typically based on the size of the organ of useless things like that. That's how I would like to recommend rolling out new features and enhancements. If again, if it's just one particular group that these enhance apply to very easily and at lunch and learn lessons learned are fantastic. You get the face-to-face people are eating, they are happy and they're getting something that's going to make the job easier, hopefully.

How to communicate the limitations of certain out-of-the-box Salesforce features?

This is a tough one because Having Salesforce technical knowledge, understanding how to configure something in Salesforce, or write the code or that it's a visual force page and not a community and things like that. The engines still care about all that. So you have to understand who you're talking to. Oftentimes I find that when a user is asking for something. It helps to not be very technical because if I say well that's just a limitation of out-of-the-box Salesforce often times that that's okay with them or conversely if they push on that then I would get an estimate from my developer as to how much that would cost and that's pretty clear for most people so I try not to get into the weeds. Like, oh the OWD is private looking fly and that meant I try not to get into that level at all of the explanation with an end-user. I just tried to tell them that you know Salesforce. Well, it is a great tool. It does have some limitations, but I would be happy to talk with the developer to find out the cost and level of effort to implement this request. Typically. That's a good answer for most people.

Strategies and tactics for successful user adoption during the change saturation period.

The next question is from Jenny and she says what strategies and tactics have you found to be successful for user adoption during periods of change saturation?

This is a good question Jenny and thank you for asking us. Change saturation happens in my experience. When an organization doesn't have a good change management strategy and release schedule. So they're just constantly new updates and just like you as a user of your Android or iPhone you get sick of the constant updates of Windows users are always having to update your end users still that fatigue as well. So my strategy for that would be to help the company Implement a change management process a release schedule so that you avoid this kind of saturation for your end-users and then which ultimately results in them saying well, you know, I'm not going to use Salesforce because it's just going to change next week. So why should I bother you don't want to have that attitude if you're trying to increase your adoption? So help your end-user by implementing a good process before rolling out all these changes.

What strategies and tactics are successful for breaking through the noise of many concurrent programs?

I'm not clear on what that means. I'm going to skip that question. All right, and we have a Q&A section here.

How do you get the users to capture a sales activity right after a meeting?

How do you go about getting a more timely theorem and tray? How do you get users to capture a sales activity right after meeting rather than at the end of the day or end of the week?

This is a good question. Thank you for asking that really I see this a lot and as a salesperson, I can tell you, it depends on your salespeople. So a lot of people are and how you're kind of into if you're inside sales at the rapid kind of day. Most inside sales reps I know are taking those madly like crazy and you'll see that entered at the end of the day again, I would have to take a look. I would recommend taking a look at your process and your training and maybe having a kind of hey. Ideal day and an ideal way you should handle conversations of your contacts.

For me when I was a Salesforce user. I entered all of my activities right then and there because I didn't want to do the double writing it down then going back and typing and trying to remember what my shorthand said. See you miss a lot of things. I think when you do that way but I've also seen a lot of I swear it's a rapid-fire kind of situation in this and those are disconnecting a call there on another call and they don't have time to type that long note or activity. Einstein's activity can help with that. I don't know what a dish of Salesforce you have for that, but I would recommend taking a look at your process. And if the sales reps are in charge of their calling activity, then it's a training issue and they would need to maybe have lunch and learn, hey, this is the most efficient way to enter your calling activity for the day and things like that. That would be my recommendation on that.

Any other questions, I'm not seeing anything new in the QA or any chat. And I think there are questions from the audience. Yep, this one more question. Can you elaborate on release management?

Whether what it is or how to do it, you basically want to have a process. When You release a feature in production whether most companies are on agile mode. They have split and so they did the first based on the release calendar they set with Any development team, so I have a number of requests that I need to complete within that first, and then that will go into the next release. Smaller companies might not have a release management strategy. They might just be doing ad hoc. As a request comes in there working on it that would be released and it can work that way for a smaller organization I think but once you get any kind of use of you're going to want to have a strategy for releasing things to maintain your developers Hannity and time and your end-users because you don't want to constantly be releasing new features like the other question that was answered earlier about saturation. You'll get fatigued if you're releasing new features every other day or every week. You definitely want to have a strategy for releasing new features and changes and have a strong team that follows that it doesn't just do ad hoc changes and releases.

There's one more question. It's about forcing the end-user for adoption if it really is required.

I don't know of any particular situation where you force someone to do something. I'm a mom and I have two kids and I know that if I try to force them to do things like at the exact opposite intended response. So, I don't know if you want to have the attitude that you're forcing user adoption, I think you want to have a conversation with the end-users and understand why they're not using Salesforce. Nine times out of ten it's because they don't see the value of it. It hasn't been communicated from the top-down why we're using this. Why do I have to spend time putting my notes in the system if I have this notebook? And things like that, they don't understand the very values the very reason the business reason why you have built for so I think that if from the top down and communicated, hey we make our buying decisions based on data and Salesforce be making Staffing decisions based on Salesforce. Things like that where they can be part of the understanding of why we need them for Us and why you need this data in my experience has resulted in people using it more but then followed by they need to be trained. They need to understand how to use it and I can't tell you how often straining just doesn't get done. As I said, it's usually the first line item that costs a statement of work for me in a project. They don't want to pay for training. They just think people will figure it out and it just doesn't happen.

So, there you go. Turns out you can not force someone for user adoption. Rather provide value, train them constantly for the processing.

]]>http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/making-salesforce-adoption-easy-for-your-sales-teams-webinar/feed/03 Steps to Create Your Own Salesperson That Never Sleepshttp://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/3-steps-to-create-your-own-salesperson-that-never-sleeps-blog/
http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/3-steps-to-create-your-own-salesperson-that-never-sleeps-blog/#respondMon, 04 May 2020 09:26:21 +0000http://ec2-107-23-194-159.compute-1.amazonaws.com/blog/?p=3810Maury Rogow is a well-acclaimed video-first marketer. He was featured on our #Limitless webinar series on 19 Sep 2019 at 10 AM PT. Read ahead to know the ‘3 Steps to Create Your Own Salesperson That Never Sleeps (Customer Journey Videos).’ The CEO of Rip Media Group has launched over 200 brands and 3 successful […]

]]>Maury Rogow is a well-acclaimed video-first marketer. He was featured on our #Limitless webinar series on 19 Sep 2019 at 10 AM PT. Read ahead to know the ‘3 Steps to Create Your Own Salesperson That Never Sleeps (Customer Journey Videos).’

The CEO of Rip Media Group has launched over 200 brands and 3 successful startups using a visual storytelling structure. One of his earliest lessons was being a part of selling a startup to Cisco Systems for $2 Billion. He is an out of the box thinker and delivers real results with video first marketing.

What will you learn by listening to this podcast?

Why are stories so important?

What is the easiest way to grab your prospect’s attention?

How to write the best stories for your brand?

The impact of the right story in the right place at the right time

Why your sales and marketing is failing and how to fix it?

Listen to the full podcast here:

We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Subscribe to our channel for your daily dose of quality learnings and insights into the world of sales and marketing.

]]>http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/3-steps-to-create-your-own-salesperson-that-never-sleeps-blog/feed/0Using better sales questions to personalize the customer experiencehttp://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/using-better-sales-questions-to-personalize-the-customer-experience/
http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/using-better-sales-questions-to-personalize-the-customer-experience/#respondMon, 04 May 2020 09:01:48 +0000http://ec2-107-23-194-159.compute-1.amazonaws.com/blog/?p=3806Deb Calvert is the President of People First Productivity Solutions. She was named by Treeline as one of “The 65 Most Influential Women in Business” and consistently appears on lists of Top Sales Influencers and Thought Leaders. She has worked as a leadership program architect, sales productivity specialist, and researcher for over 20 years. Her […]

]]>Deb Calvert is the President of People First Productivity Solutions. She was named by Treeline as one of “The 65 Most Influential Women in Business” and consistently appears on lists of Top Sales Influencers and Thought Leaders. She has worked as a leadership program architect, sales productivity specialist, and researcher for over 20 years.

Her unique mix of senior-level Sales, Human Resources, and Operations experience gives her valuable insight and the ability to understand the challenges faced by companies and senior leaders. Deb is a top sales & leadership speaker for organizations and industry events.

Key Takeaways

Customers don’t just want customer service anymore, they are expecting a full-on experience. They want something relevant, meaningful, and personalized version.

One of the missing pieces that a lot of salespeople don’t realize is that the very best customer experience is when the customers get to participate in creating what they want.

When a great customer experience that’s ongoing, it translates into customer loyalty.

Three important factors that prevent sellers from asking quality questions,

Buyers don’t think that the salespeople are asking quality questions.

The salespeople think asking quality questions will take too much time.

We have been told that asking questions is rude or intrusive.

People don’t ask better questions because they have never been taught.

Indications that the salesperson thinks he is asking the right questions,

Any indication that the salesperson makes the buyers pause reflect and go deeper than they typically do.

How do salespeople use questions to stimulate the potential client’s interest?

By asking better questions, thought-provoking questions, and questions that leave people dangling that they wanna engage more.

Difference between quality questions and standard questions:

Instead of asking questions to make a sale or appointment, ask questions to know the buyer’s needs.

The assessment should be converted from Diagnostic type to Dialogic(two way) type.

On a discovery call, a salesperson should check the intention of the individual whom he/she is speaking to. That makes the whole process easier and more successful.

Listen to the full podcast here:

We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Subscribe to our channel for your daily dose of quality learnings and insights into the world of sales and marketing.

Transcript of the podcast:

Speaker: Deb Calvert

Host: Vivekanandan Sivasubramanian

Vivek: Welcome to another episode of Limitless Podcast. A place where we bring together a group of leaders in sales and my name is Vivek and I’ll be your host today. We have an amazing guest with us. She’s one of the most influential women in sales. We have Deb Calvert the President of People First Productivity Solutions. Hello Deb.

Deb: Hello Vivek. It’s really a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for hosting me today.

Vivek: Thank you so much for joining in today. I’m really excited to have your before that to tell a bit about Deb Calvert, Deb is the President of People First Productivity Solutions. People First specializes in improving sales productivity leadership development and enhancing team effectiveness. She’s also the founder of Sales Expert channel. Deb has over 30 years of experience in sales. So, she’s the right person to tell you what worked twenty years back will not work now. And, she has seen the entire transition. She’s also the author of the book Discover Questions and many others. Deb is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. For 5 years in a row, that is from 2014 to 2018, she’s been named one of the top 50 sales and marketing influencers. She’s one of the most Innovative sales bloggers and there are dozens of those. If you are a sales professional then Deb Calvert is the person you must follow .

Hi Deb, it would be great if you could tell us a bit about yourself. The work you do at People First and a quick glimpse into your career.

Deb: Well, I started this company 15 years ago. We’re coming up on our 15-year anniversary and the really hard three parts of the business, as you said team effectiveness leadership development and sales productivity, but what’s important for people to know is that those three things are not as different as they sound. What they all have in common where they overlap is that they’re about getting people connected and so all the work that I do the research that I do what I write about is how to make better connections whether it’s buyers to sellers or leaders to followers or team members to each other.

And as sales people know, you’re really doing all three at the same time all the time. So there’s a great deal of overlap.

Vivek: Today. We are going to speak with Deb about a very specific topic but nevertheless, it’s a very important one. It’s about using better sales questions to personalize the customer experience. To set the context of recently, I came across a study by the company called Gon Ohio the revenue intelligence. So what they did was they analyzed millions of cold calls and came up with some interesting findings. It’s one such findings, when they analyzed the successful cold calls against the unsuccessful cold calls. They had a duration of less than three minutes and 40 seconds. Whereas when they looked at the most successful cold calls they lasted over 5 minutes and 50 seconds. When they dug deeper to see what helped reps to have better conversation or longer, one key element that stood out there was these reps have asked better questions for the right one.

Asking better questions can make a world of difference. In fact, it is not just confined to phone calls. So that is what we want to talk about today using better sales questions to personalize the customer experience. Okay here goes the first question. So you said that asking better questions improves the customer experience. What do you mean by the phrase customer experience?

Deb: Well, that is really important. So, you know customers no longer want just Customer service that And we won’t get anywhere if we don’t provide good customer service, but the standard has been raised customers now want a full experience. They want something that’s relevant and meaningful and personalized to them. So a customer experience or CX as it’s often called is about every single touchpoint whether it’s online, and it comes to your website or if they got a cold call and they’re working with perhaps your Business Development rep or it’s that you have had a long term relationship with that customer but every time you have an interaction with them all of that every single time that there’s a touch point that is a part of the customer experience and buyers have all become very demanding when it comes to what’s involved in that customer experience.

And that reason for that is that they have so many other options and as consumers not just in business. This is staying in the space of business-to-consumer. The experience is increasingly personalized and it’s increasingly thoughtful about what the customer wants. So here’s the most important thing I would say about a customer experience. It’s one of the missing pieces that a lot of sales people don’t realize is that the very best customer experience is when the customer gets to participate in creating what they want. It’s not that you went away and did really good service for them and then brought something back to them. Instead, it’s that you worked with them. They got to collaborate, they get to put their own imprint their own thoughts and their own feelings into that solution and when you To take that when you allow your customer to be involved in the experience of creating what they want of influencing the final product or at least that the terms of the for the delivery of it. When you allow them to do that that in customers minds is not just an experience but its value its value creation that makes it really difficult for them to say no to what you’re offering. So that’s why it’s so important and I’m glad that we’ve defined it first.

Vivek: So as you said in fact a couple of years back, people would assume the customer experience or customer satisfaction begins after, once the purchase is made. However, what you said was it is not the case. The moment, the very first touch point when the customer in interacts with your website or your company. The journey begins right there.

Deb: Even as they’re developing awareness and interest in what you offer, they’re going to have the emotional reaction to it and to the thought of doing business with you and your company. Experience has to be positive right from the beginning.

Vivek: What the benefits of offering a better customer experience?

Deb: Well, it’s the obvious ones. First of all, you’ll differentiate yourself from the competition. The more relevant, meaningful and personalized you can make that experience the more you can involve the customer. The more differentiated you are and the harder it is for them to say no to you. And this is true the first time that you sell to them but also every time when there’s a great customer experience and that’s ongoing it’s plates into customer loyalty and some research by cool ski who’s one of the leaders in the field of customer experience his research says that 87 percent of customers are willing to pay more when they have a great. Text so we can make a business case for customer experience very easily.

Vivek: So let’s dive into the topic now. How would asking better questions accomplish what you are describing.

Deb: First of all, there are really only two ways to create the customer experience. You could spend a lot of money. Wining and dining and catering to each and every customer or prospect that you have and that’s time consuming and expensive. So not feasible. The only alternative to that is to create an experience to get them involved to get them feeling like it’s personalized and meaningful.

The only other way that I can possibly imagine to do that is by asking quality questions. Quality questions that engage them in the conversation, quality questions that stimulate thought provoke thought that they haven’t had before, quality questions that create a two-way dialogue because a two-way give-and-take dialogue is all by itself in experience. And, you know, sign a bit of research from the book Stop Selling and Start Reading, that one is where we interviewed B2B buyers about what they wanted from sellers and the number one behavior the most important behavior, although they liked all 30 of the ones we asked about the one that buyers preferred above all others is that there be a two-way dialogue with the salesperson. So buyers want this and they view it as but as let me roll it up like this and say the bottom line is that people don’t ask better questions because they’ve never been taught it’s more than just make it open-ended certainly that helps but there’s so much more about sequence and purposefulness of your questions that people could improve.

Vivek: So, if I’m a sales rep and I’ve been doing this for say five to six years. If I want to evaluate myself, how can I know that if I’m asking the right questions, is there any indicator?

Deb: Yes, one of the best indicators and it’s the best compliment people ever give me and that is when somebody pauses after you ask a question and they’re thoughtful, you can see that they’re thinking and then they say, “Well Vivek, that’s a really good question”. As soon as you hear that, you know, you’re on the right track or something like it if people say that you’re making me really think or if people say I never thought about that before any indicator that you’ve made them pause and reflect and go a little bit deeper than they typically do that’s when you know, you’re on the right track. Otherwise, they’re just firing quick answers at you because they already knew and now it’s just if they already know it’s doing you a favor to give you the information as opposed to a true two-way dialogue.

Vivek: You also talk about personalizing the questions to create a better customer experience. Could you please elaborate on that a bit?

Deb: To personalize means that you have to listen. And, when you listen you’re going to pick up on tone of voice or inflection, you’ll notice the pauses or the hesitations. And, when you do, you have a rich opportunity to personalize. You might be able to say something like I noticed that there was a little bit more there that you sounded like you almost wanted to say tell me more about that what’s what’s really going on here, right if you have the trust built. Or maybe you just can use research that you’ve done. So instead of asking things like when did your business open? You can say I researched notice that you opened your business in 2014, tell me more about that? What led to your decision to do that? I’m interested in your origin story.

So whenever people are talking about themselves instead of talking just facts and figures or generically that’s personal.

Vivek: So one of the common things we see in sales script, me being a part of our marketing team, whenever I interact with my sales team, the common problem that I’ve seen them facing is I have reached out to the prospect or the client, but I have no response. I had an initial call, it went well but I couldn’t get them to respond again. What do you think is the problem there using the way of asking better questions, how can I go about solving it?

Deb: Let’s face it. None of us take time to email back or call back if we’re not interested. We’re not interested in the product. We’re not interested in the conversation. We’re not interested in the person.But we will call back or right back to somebody if we’re interested. So your real question is how do we use questions to stimulate someone’s interest. And better questions, thought provoking questions that leave people dangling in suspense. They want to know more, they want to engage more, those kinds of questions are of higher value and they earned the right to have a callback for him an email back.

Vivek: If you don’t mind putting, please give us some examples of this difference between quality questions in standard questions?

Deb: I actually used to teach a class at Berkeley University of California, Berkeley and Group of SDRs and BDRs who I gave the assignment to use to discover questions. That’s my first book and they’re eight purposes of questions there. But I give them an assignment to develop and test questions on cold calls and cold emails to see which one’s work. So I tell you that because the examples it’ll give you our field tested and I didn’t write them.

But they really did work. So in a few of the examples it was Somebody had sampled a piece of content. Let’s say it’s your company. Somebody had listened to a podcast like this or had picked up an instructional video and the company was tracking and then turning those leads over to the SDR team. And those folks were then calling up now what they used to say what most organizations have their sales development reps say is something like – Hey, I noticed that you watched our video. How can I help you? And they don’t use their questions to bridge the gap between there was some kind of Interest there’s a reason somebody watch this and maybe there’s an opportunity so questions that they would ask in place where things like what is it that caused you to be interested in this topic about using questions to open more sales? Or what is it that caused you to download this piece of content from our website? What did you like about the content? What else do you need? What would be a natural follow-up for you?

Instead of talking about making the sale or setting the appointment it’s about talking about the buyer’s need and the buyers interest. Let’s get back to the beginning and align ourselves with where the buyer is instead of trying to push the accelerator to some place. They’re not ready to go yet and questions give you those opportunities.

Vivek: Brilliant! This is something I personally favor. We could say exactly mention someone listen to the podcast or webinar. Okay. How do I make the transition? Okay, listen to this and often the directly switch to the pitch and you lose your audience there.

Deb: Yes, it is. It’s about it’s about being more natural in buying and selling. We sometimes forget the relationship or the progression of any conversation. It should stay natural. We get lost in our effort to just try to close the appointment or close the sale.

Vivek: So what else catches sellers learn about asking quality questions? what resources can you offer?

Deb: There are lots of resources. I hope people come to my website and take a look at the weekly blog or sign up to the newsletter or read the book or take the online training course and discover questions, all of these are available. But let me just give a higher level recommendation. I like people to begin to think of their discovery process even before you open. To think at the very beginning of the exchange with the customer as an experience you’re going to give the customer.

And then reframe what you’re going to do when you assess their needs instead of making it diagnostic which is what needs assessment or discovery processes are right now. We’re just asking enough questions to diagnose a problem and write the prescription to solve the problem.

So I’d like you to think about shifting from a diagnostic needs assessment to a dialogic needs assessment dialogic two-way exchange. We’re both involved, we’re in it together. We’re going to class great to talk about your situation and co-create the solution and that is a game changer when people can use questions to do that.

Vivek: So one more thing I wanted to ask is in your book ‘Discover Questions’, you talk about 8 discrete purposes for asking questions. It would be great if you can just give a glimpse of what a short version of what they are or what the book is about?

Deb: That book is based on 25 years of field research with buyers interviewed buyers after they had been talked with after they spent time with sellers who were trained in discover questions. And of course, I also observe the sellers before and after they were taught about discover questions.

So 25 years worth of research over 10,000 sales calls and sales people learn about 8 purposes of asking questions discovers an acronym each letter stands for different type of questions. Research says that most sellers use only three or four out of those eight purposes the ones they must typically use ‘D’ for data. They gather facts. They often ask the same question that’s for consequences or pain point and that usually do ask the ‘O’ question, which is outcomes the hopes dreams plans with visions of the future that the buyer would like but that means that there are five other kinds of questions that people typically aren’t asking, missing out a lot of information those other five types of questions help you be more purposeful and also more efficient so that you can be more effective.

I’ll just give you one of them would have probably not a time for all five. But my favorite one the one that I see making the biggest difference to buyers is the ‘V’ that’s a value question and it’s what I mentioned earlier. It’s about understanding the motivations. The reason this is important and how important it is relative to all your other needs. What’s the hierarchy of value? How important is this? How urgent is this and you can gain a great deal of insight plus bond emotionally with your buyer just by asking value questions.

Vivek: This is the question I want to ask. If I am a sales rep I go on the first discovery call or initial call with my client. What is that I should expect to learn about the prospect by the end of the call.

Deb: That’s a great question. I hope that you will learn more than their business needs. That’s probably the standard answer that most sales managers would give is learn about their needs so that you can create a solution. But I would say that the other thing that’s very important to learn is what’s in it for that individual not just the business needs but their individual needs is that their esteem and the company, is it one of their key performance indicators that are going to be measured on this, is that just a nuisance to them? And they really want to get it off their plate or is it not that important at all? It’s just something that they feel like they have to check off their list. They can say that with the salesperson move on. Yeah you need to know what’s their motivation and when you know that you can respond to it appropriately and find out what your next step should be.

Vivek: Deb, before you go, I would like to ask you a few questions on the rapid fire basis. Whose content do you follow LindenIn or any other pieces?

Deb: There are so many people. There are 76 people in the Sales Experts Channel and 2020 this year. And, I follow all 76 of them. I also follow people in women sales Pros because I know many of the sales leaders who were there in the incredible part that they have the desire they have to give to the sales community. So between those two there’s about a hundred people that I follow and I recommend if people really want to follow them, go to the websites thesalesexpertschannel.com for women salespress.com.

Vivek: So everyone the link to thesalesexpertchannel.com and Deb’sLinkedIn profile, as you know, all other links where you can follow her are provided in the description. So feel free to check it out.

The next one is what is the book you would recommend?

Deb: I am a big reader and there are a lot of very very good books out there. I really like when the Chad Burmeister put out last year. It’s about Ai and selling that’s a great book. George Bronson has a new one that’s coming out and Anita Nelson’s book for anybody who has missed that. I’ve been really interested in Ai. And so it’s about beating the bots and how to keep the human element in selling alongside. Chad Burmeister is about using Ai. Those two are very nice and complement each other.

Vivek: Just a follow-up question. What’s your take on AI and Selling?

Deb: I think it’s fabulous. I love sales hacks. I love efficiency. I love being able to automate. At the same time I’m greatly concerned because there’s a misunderstanding and the misunderstanding is that we can just let the Ai in the tools and the tech that we have do part of our job.

And unfortunately, we think it’s going to do the wrong part of our job. We think it’s going to do the human touch piece of our job and it won’t. It’s going to free us up so that we can do more and better work. The connection piece and if we don’t use it that way it’s compromising it. It hurts your results.

Vivek: The last garage question. If you want our listeners to take one thing away from this podcast, what that would be?

Deb: Think about your own perceptions of questions. If you have a negative thought about asking questions, or if you hold back about asking questions, try to figure out what’s really going on there.

If you have some sort of perceptual barrier, that’s keeping you from unleashing a connection, a really profound powerful connection with buyers and it will be in your way until you figure out what that problem is and then push yourself to work through it because questions really are like magic. They create value they created a memorable experience and the advance sales.

I can promise you that your perception about questions is wrong or that you don’t know enough about questions to work through that and I’d ask you to give questions a second chance.

We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Subscribe to our channel for your daily dose of quality learnings and insights into the world of sales and marketing.

]]>http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/using-better-sales-questions-to-personalize-the-customer-experience/feed/0How to lead like a modern CMOhttp://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/how-to-lead-like-a-modern-cmo-podcast/
http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/how-to-lead-like-a-modern-cmo-podcast/#respondWed, 29 Apr 2020 09:32:18 +0000http://ec2-107-23-194-159.compute-1.amazonaws.com/blog/?p=3728Sangram Vajre is the co-founder and chief evangelist of Terminus. Before Terminus, Vajre led the marketing team at Pardot through its acquisition by ExactTarget and then Salesforce. He’s also the author of Account-Based Marketing For Dummies, ABM is B2B and is the host of FlipMyFunnel podcast. Sangram was featured on our Limitless Webinar series on […]

]]>Sangram Vajre is the co-founder and chief evangelist of Terminus. Before Terminus, Vajre led the marketing team at Pardot through its acquisition by ExactTarget and then Salesforce. He’s also the author of Account-Based Marketing For Dummies, ABM is B2B and is the host of FlipMyFunnel podcast.

Sangram was featured on our Limitless Webinar series on Mar 04, 2020. It was an insightful session and here are the key takeaways from the webinar.

Key Takeaways

– Trends (going from lead to accounts)
– Role (own parts of customer success)
– Organization (running a team of specialist – act like a CEO)
– Metrics (Business outcomes and same metrics as sales)
– Stage based CMOs (Different type of CMO for a different stage of the company)
– What are the key attributes any CMO needs in their toolbelt
– What keeps CMOs up at night or what keeps you up at night being a CMO yourself?
– How and why to manage your team according to KPIs
– What are the Key ABM findings for CMOs to consider
– Should marketers own parts of customer success?
– Should a startup hire a specialist or generalist first?
– What do you mean when you say CMOs should act like CEOs? elaborate
– Is there a right type of CMO based on the stage of the company?
– You always say marketing does not demand gen, and it’s business outcomes (demand gen, pipeline velocity, expansion). Could you elaborate on that?
– When is the right time to create a category? How do you know it’s the right time and you have the scope?
– What budget does an SMB need to start ABM?
– Is ABM ideal for a startup with no sales team?
– What is your idea of positioning to begin with, in a saturated market?
– Minimum basic strategy and tech stack needed for omnichannel marketing for a B2B tech company with a limited budget?
– Where do you see the biggest skills gap in marketing today, and how do you overcome that challenge?
– How to become a CMO?
– Which medium works better in ABM? Sales Nav, Webinars, Seminars, etc?
– When is the right time to hire a CMO?

Listen to the full podcast here:

We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Subscribe to our channel for your daily dose of quality learnings and insights into the world of sales and marketing.

]]>http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/how-to-lead-like-a-modern-cmo-podcast/feed/0How to lead like a modern CMOhttp://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/how-to-lead-like-a-modern-cmo-webinar/
http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/how-to-lead-like-a-modern-cmo-webinar/#respondThu, 23 Apr 2020 06:08:36 +0000http://ec2-107-23-194-159.compute-1.amazonaws.com/blog/?p=3409Sangram Vajre is the co-founder and chief evangelist of Terminus. Before Terminus, Vajre led the marketing team at Pardot through its acquisition by ExactTarget and then Salesforce. He’s also the author of Account-Based Marketing For Dummies, ABM is B2B and is the host of FlipMyFunnel podcast. Sangram was featured on our Limitless Webinar series on […]

]]>Sangram Vajre is the co-founder and chief evangelist of Terminus. Before Terminus, Vajre led the marketing team at Pardot through its acquisition by ExactTarget and then Salesforce. He’s also the author of Account-Based Marketing For Dummies, ABM is B2B and is the host of FlipMyFunnel podcast.

Sangram was featured on our Limitless Webinar series on Mar 04, 2020. It was an insightful session and here are the key takeaways from the webinar.

Key Takeaways

– Trends (going from lead to accounts)– Role (own parts of customer success)– Organization (running a team of specialist – act like a CEO)– Metrics (Business outcomes and same metrics as sales)– Stage based CMOs (Different type of CMO for a different stage of the company)– What are the key attributes any CMO needs in their toolbelt– What keeps CMOs up at night or what keeps you up at night being a CMO yourself?– How and why to manage your team according to KPIs– What are the Key ABM findings for CMOs to consider– Should marketers own parts of customer success?– Should a startup hire a specialist or generalist first?– What do you mean when you say CMOs should act like CEOs? elaborate– Is there a right type of CMO based on the stage of the company?– You always say marketing does not demand gen, and it’s business outcomes (demand gen, pipeline velocity, expansion). Could you elaborate on that?– When is the right time to create a category? How do you know it’s the right time and you have the scope?– What budget does an SMB need to start ABM?– Is ABM ideal for a startup with no sales team?– What is your idea of positioning to begin with, in a saturated market?– Minimum basic strategy and tech stack needed for omnichannel marketing for a B2B tech company with a limited budget?– Where do you see the biggest skills gap in marketing today, and how do you overcome that challenge?– How to become a CMO?– Which medium works better in ABM? Sales Nav, Webinars, Seminars, etc?– When is the right time to hire a CMO?

Watch the complete webinar:

Transcript of the webinar:

Speaker: Sangram VajreHost: Sanjana Murali

Sanjana: Welcome to Hippo Videos Limitless Webinar Series, Sangram.

Sangram: Thank you so much, excited. You guys have done a fantastic job of promoting this. Getting the message out there. So hopefully, we can add a lot of value to the people who are listening.

So good morning to everybody who is logging in from the states. And a good evening to everybody from the rest of the World. My name is Sanjana. I'm the product marketer. Glad you guys could join the webinar today. So in the next 60 minutes, you're going to hear from Sangram on how to lead like a modern CMO.

He's the co-founder and chief evangelist at Dome and that's. And he led the marketing team at our door. And then it was quickly acquired by ExactTarget and then by Salesforce. He's the host of Flip, my final podcast with over 550 episodes. Right. And it continues to run the top 50 in the business category on iTunes. And he's the best selling author of All Abia Must Be to Be. And he's also the founder of Flip My Funnel Community and ABM Evangelist.

www.brandequity.com

What does it take to become a modern CMO?

What does it take to become a CMO? You know, to be specific, what does it take to become a modern CMO? Now, let's just take one at a time. So the first one, what keeps CMOs at night? I feel like the majority of the CMO is that I know they never talk to a customer.

And the fear a lot of times they feel is that they don't know what really matters to their customers.

So what happens at the majority of the organization? That's when we'll go into the modern CMO, which is different. But a majority of the organization's CMO is creating the standard process and program around saying, all right, we're going to create the right to webinar Surmont, an ebook, amount, a set of content, product, marketing, datasheets, all those different things.

But they're actually not thinking about what all our customers really want and there's a big gap there. And the reason they're doing what they're doing right now, just to create the volume of leads and volume of activity, because that's what they're measured on. So what keeps most CMO who are not thinking about this, keeps them up at night is like, I don't know what my customer really wants. I'm going to just put stuff on the whiteboard and just forget it all over the place because they just don't know. And that's a really big challenge for a lot of organizations.

And that's why Forrester's research shows that less than 1 percent of the leaves turn into customers. So the data supports that believes that most companies don't drive actual revenue. That's what I think most about. I think CMO that did just not talking enough anymore and CMO that the people that I'm feeling more and more of the people that we have interviewed on the podcast like Megan Isenberg from Trippe Actions or No turn-off, we just became the theme of Tendo like car Lacy who is the CMO less than Lee or Ryan.

All these are due to the craftsy of all these people. They're looking at it very differently. They are in with the customer. They are actually having conversations on LinkedIn or other places and engaging with them.

They're having. And I know some of these CMO, they're having at least two to three customer calls. They're listening to the onboarding call. They're listening to the sales call. They're not just sitting in their office in an ivory tower and trying to say elegies do that. They actually are very close to the customer. So if you are trying to be a CMO, answer your second question.

I think one of the things you need to know is do you really understand your customer? And if you don't, then are you going to take the time on a regular basis?

Not the first 30 days. We learn everything and then we just market as usual, but actually take the time as a regular thing. So one of the things I try to do is that every week I'll at least be or attend or listen to one sales call and one onboarding. That is something I've done for years.

I highly recommend people do that because when you do that, you are the CSO deem your customer success team and your sales team is the closest to the customers. And if you're not listening to those calls, even if you don't do anything, if you don't listen to it, you don't know and you can't empathize with your customer and see what the problem is and have ideas around that. So a modern CMO, I think, is someone who is really empathetic to the customer and just says that they actually do it right.

So it doesn't matter what you do. So to be up more than seeing it more, you have to talk to your customers every day. And only then you'll be able to empathize with them. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's not necessarily mean you're on call every single day. That just means that you are engaged, let's say on a LinkedIn thread. That means I love what I do is I'll ask a question and see what people are talking about. That might mean listening to an onboarding call. That might mean doing a workshop with your sales team.

What are the key metrics a CMO should like?

It's doing something every day where it actually has some sort of connection with the customer because it's so easy, so easy to lose that, so easy to get off the rails and be just talking about programs and strategies and not actually know what our customers really want. It's a really deadly trap. Like you said. So traditionally, marketing is often measured by the number of leads generated. So do you think the number of leads us to the right metric to be measured? So what are the key metrics a CMO should like? Yeah, that is it.

That's a great question. One of the things that I'm on my soapbox lately has been the fact that leaves are probably the worst type of vanity metrics that marketing can track. And we talked about that stat from Forrister, which clearly said that while less than we said. So imagine having this conversation. Everybody just imagines this. You are walking into your CEO and CEO's office and saying to them, hey, only one percent of what I do actually drives business.

Do you want to give me more money? Like it's ludicrous. Right. So. So it doesn't make sense. So nobody's having this level of conversation we hide. Find the MQ URL Escuela and we talk. But if you really look at the number of leads to actual results, the gap is so wide that it will swallow you if you really go and show it to your SO you'll be fired if you actually. So I don't think Leeds is actually the right metric.

And the reason it's getting asked and talked about is because that's what we put on our board backs. That's what we represent. And I did that when I was a part. I did that. I show leaves to Asha. I showed traffic to the website. I'm just thinking about that deck. I showed all the number of people who attended my webinar and registrations, all these things. Reality.

If you're into it, I'm assuming a lot of the people listening to us are in big business. You gotta know your total addressable market. So the question I would ask is how many of the deals that your sales team is working on?

How many of the leaves are coming for those accounts that they need to close that month or that quarter?

If there's one homework that I can get right off the bat like right now is that just go and look at your deals that are in pipeline for this quarter and look at let's say there are 50 accounts that are in your pipeline and find out if you can generate more leads if the lead is the metric.

More leads in those accounts for your sales team to close, give them air cover in some way possible to them. If you're not doing that, we are literally not even in the same loving field when it comes to sales and marketing. So I feel leads quite honestly is probably the worst type of leading indicator of success. It's a false positive.

What does it take for a CMO to act like a CMO?

All right. And also, you say CMO should act like CEOs. Right. So that is an interesting proposition. So could you please elaborate on that?

Yeah, I mean, as a matter of fact, we just hired my mentor and boss from ExactTarget, who is the CMO of ExactTarget for 60 years, went through the IPO, went through all that. We just hired him and he is now the CEO of Terminus. So it's literally happening right now, said Tim. Blop is the CEO of Terminus. And it is like it literally is happening everywhere. But in general, what it means is not just going to be a CEO, but it acts and operates as a CEO.

And anything. Think about what CEOs do. CEOs will look at their organization and say, all right, these are the things that I need to focus on. They need predictable stuff in their business. They don't have predictability. They're not going to be in that position too long to let them go. So they're looking for how we create and predict certain things. Then the second thing is they take full ownership of what to say yes to and what to say no to.

Most marketing is a yes team for the most part because they don't know what they're measuring.

And that's a lot of it is not driving revenue. A lot of times what happens in marketing organizations is there is to go and say, okay, yeah, we'll do a webinar, we'll do an e-book.

Well, we'll do that. We'll do that. They don't know how to prioritize because the picture of success is not very clear. So Lieb's is your picture of success. Then you will do whatever it takes to do that. But if revenue is your picture of success, you will pause. We'll take a moment. You will look at the deals that are in the pipe right now and saying for these 50 deals, what can I do?

You will then say all of these 50 deals. Let me look at it. OK, for these wheat fields, ten of them are in Boston. Let me do an event in Boston. Right. Like two now you're thinking how do I drive business outcomes? Maybe you're looking at that and saying, hey, we just got an e-book. But these are in financial services. Now, let me create an ebook. Take the same ebook, the generic one.

Turn that into a financial services-oriented ebook and send that to those 10 accounts that are in the pipeline. So now you're starting to create real value for the business and driving business outcomes. So the metric that I'm asking every CMO to start really focusing on and that's something that I belong to. Unfortunately, with a therapy of 10 years or so being in space is a business outcome. Everything you do is business outcomes.

www.medium.com

Should marketers also own parts of the customer's success?

All right. OK. So when you talk about 90 metrics, you say you have to focus on business outcomes. Right. Should marketers also own parts of customer success? That's an interesting question because your marketers by far are in a way the first touchpoint in almost all these different areas marketing, sales, success, brand stuff.

I don't think you need to, but what you do need and what I'm seeing through the whole account-based marketing lens is one of the greatest areas. And I'll give an example. Thomson Reuters Have you, as you saw the book, you know, probably that that's a story that I mentioned in the book. Thomson Reuters. They essentially said we're going to start working on expansion deals. Right. So that's the customer success arena. And that's a marketing team like we have more than one product.

We've got to sell to them. We've got to do something about it. So they started and then, by the way, that whole story came about when I was interviewing Jillian on a podcast and she told me the whole story, I'm like, oh, my God is awesome. That turned into a book. So like, really amazing how that came about. But she mentioned that, like, hey, they picked up 250 accounts and said these 250 accounts were gonna start focusing on and try to create offerings with the other products that Thomson Reuters has.

This is a gigantic company. Their win rate. Was ninety-five percent OK with those accounts? Now you think about a company called Thomson Reuters. The deal sizes, you're talking millions and millions of dollars in revenue.

Right. And the only reason they were able to scale to a ninety-five percent win rate was because they focused on the right accounts. And that was marketing. So if the color of the money is green or whatever, the color is the same color for acquisition, for the pipeline, for expansion.

I think marketing needs to really get out of the demand gen box, open the blinders and start looking at saying, all right, where can we drive revenue for the organization? A 10 percent increase in win rate for India within the pipeline. That might mean millions. That might mean you don't have to generate that many leads. That's why I keep talking to Leeds. Really is a virus in a way for organizations to kind of get out of. Because if you measure that, you'll never measure what's really impacting the business.

You stop measuring that and start looking at how I drive business outcomes that will mean customer meetings. That would mean how do I stop customers from churning, increase retention, how to increase velocity, how to increase the size of the sort of deals within that. Those are the metrics that are your CEO, your CFO. They. They did look at this every day. But marketers are not looking at it. If you start talking about them, you will have a seat at the table.

www.naceweb.org

How does a CMO overcome the skill gap in marketing?

All right. Got it. So talking about measuring metrics and becoming a modern CMO so that you see that because of the skill gap in marketing today. And how do you overcome that challenge? I quote the ultimate question on that one.

Right? I think one of the things that we are going back and forth on LinkedIn, I was talking about this idea like this.

CMO seems like a sexy title and people want to have it but look at it. Most cinemas are not in their job, so more do three years. So what do you not wish for?

So just take that with a grain of salt. Most organization’s sims are not necessarily what they need in the early.

So for example, if you're a startup organization listening to this, you probably don't need a CMO until you hit like a 10 million in revenue. Unless like in my case we were like I was a co-founder, so it was just a title that I had. It didn't really matter. As a co-founder. So. But if you're not a founder of an organization, then you don't really need a CMO.

It's too early, too much then. That's not the role. What you need is a doer. You need a whole bunch of like, let's just get this thing running up and running up and running like a lot of stuff. So I constantly recommend and advise companies like until 10 million. Don't even think about a CMO. It's just not right now within that.

If you are someone like you, I would put myself in a category where I love to build categories. I like to build something that's not been done before. I'm not trying to go into existing marketing. I want to create a new market. Now, that's a completely different breed of CMO. So I would be a very horrible CMO for a company that is like, you know, scaling super-fast has like, you know, 2 billion in revenue.

I'll be horrible unless they give me the wiggle room to just drive crazy stuff. So I would be really good at an early stage startup company from 10 to 100 million but over a billion dollars or over 500 million.

I may not be the right CMO. So you need a CMO skillset document. That different skill set is not the right CMO. I've seen really good friends, really amazing CMO.

MMOs fail because it wasn't they didn't have the team there and they didn't have the infrastructure, they didn't have the support and all that stuff. So if you are someone who wants to be a CMO first, figure out if you really want to do that. Look at the trajectory of that. Right. The second is that the right industry and company you want to be in terms of revenue because if you get in early and you do, you're not someone who thrives on chaos.

Then early-stage startup is going to be really, really hard for you to be a CMO. If you're someone who likes team building and likes making sure that a bunch of people do other things, events at a massive scale and stuff, then maybe it's a bigger organization that you should go for. So the skill set Sinjin up really depends on the type of the size of the company and also the type of personality most people have got to totally understand.

www.cdncleverism.com

Should a startup hire a specialist or a generalist?

So speaking of startups, should a startup hire a specialist or a generalist first specialist all day long?

We have like so we are like I don't know for sure. I think the last seven numbers we shared was twenty-five million determinists went from about three co-founders to now we are about 250 people. Our marketing team, we acquired two companies in the last few years. Bright Funnell And six or so now, or I think the marketing team is about 14 people or so and almost everyone is a specialist in marketing is the only function by the way.

This is something that is really interesting that started to dawn on me as that marketing. And I wonder what your thoughts are on that. I think marketing is the only function where you have a bunch of specialists and you need that, right, because it's not like a salesperson meeting Quora. OK, we need 20% of that person like that kind of background and stuff that doesn't work. Like somebody who's doing videos good at videos is probably not good at content.

Somebody is good at content, probably not good at product marketing staff. Who's got a product? Marketing is probably not good at events. And so you have a whole bunch of like the A14 specialist in the team and now a CMO, if that's good news for CMO is because if you're not good at anything like me, you become a CMO because they don't know where to put you.

Right. So. So that's what happens with people like me who are generalists or not really great at anything. People are really, really, really, really good at something. They have to really quickly figure out how to meet someone and get others to do it. Otherwise, they become the bottleneck for their own career.

We ought to have a team of specialists here. We got about 10 people and each and every one of them is a specialist in certain areas. We have a specialist baby and we have a specialist but even for intensive marketing, for videos, all the stuff. Yeah. To see. Yeah, we have ahead of marketing. Yeah.

I mean and to me, that's like how big is yours. I don't know. You don't have to share revenue stuff. Like how big is your customer base? How big is like your market that you're going after.

We have 5000 customers with us. So you have a pretty good-sized customer base at this point. It depends on what your revenue is and stuff like that. A head of marketing is. Probably like a CMO. Yeah, exactly. So I think it goes the same when I think about what's interesting and I think this is where a lot of people are stuck in marketing, not really talking about true empathy or here. Right.

This is real. Yeah. Most marketers are not ready and should never try to become CMO. And the reason is that CMO means that you are constantly under fire or something.

So if the revenue is going down, CMO gets a call. If retention is bad, CMO gets a call. Website branding. I mean, the reality is everybody in the company knows what marketing should do except the CMO, apparently. Right. Like that's really the thing. Everybody thinks they know marketing. So CMO is a really, really, really tough role to be in. And if you don't have thick skin, you can adapt to all those things.

If you are not great at a relational shift in relationships with CFO and see our Sciarra, whatever your head of sales says and a product like, it's a really, really shitty job when it comes. If you don't have that level of support from all of it.

On the other side, people who are especially if you're really good at content if you're really good. And then there's no there's so much creativity for you to go and do and explore your craft and be the best person and the best version of yourself. So I think I would advise all the time to last a lot of folks that think about it like, do you really want to be that just for the title?

You actually could make more money and have more like happiness in your life. If you're the best at your craft in it. So choose wisely. All right.

All right, so speaking of this, it brings me to my next question, which is if companies at different stages of their lifecycle have different requirements. For example, an early-stage venture might have a different set of requirements, whereas a post IPO or a public company might have a different set of objectives. Right. So is there a type of CMO based on the stage of the company?

Yeah, it's a different CMO altogether. It's a different CMO. If you think about our own, we have gone through like three. I mean, the reason I'm not a Full-Time CMO anymore is because I'm not right for our company to be a CMO. I'm better at being an evangelist. My heart is I want to talk to customers every day. I love connecting with people. I love speaking. I love writing. So that's what I do.

Right. So I don't even talk about our product at all. I will talk about the company. I love the culpability culture. So this is where I'm at.

I feel like I find more joy and passion. And thankfully, that drives business for our company. So I get to do who I am. So if I were to hold on to the title and say I just want the country to be there, I think it will 1 not be the right thing for the business and it won't be the right thing for me at this stage of our company. So we have gone to like to see demos in our organization already and Laden is our CMO right now.

He was the CMO at Dun Bradstreet. That would be a net prospect that got quite done. He has taken companies from our size to 200 million. So he knows the skill. You need a completely different CMO almost every day. And that's no different for unless you can grow into it.

And that's a different personality altogether. But that's not just for CMO. That's for heroes. That's for the head of products. Very few companies have the same people at zero to 10, 10 to 50, 50 to 100, 100 plus. It's a very different ballgame.

All right. So we'll move on to Abia. So one of the most asked questions when it comes to ABM is what budget does an assembly need to stop ABM? Is it suitable for companies of all sizes? No, it's not good for all companies. I'll give you an example. And it is actually totally independent of what size company you are, actually. What I'm learning is that it's important to know what size your customer’s company is. So, for example, logistic HubSpot is an example.

HubSpot is a great CRM. It's a public company, great size. One would think like they would be the perfect use case for ABM. Not so much because 99 percent of the companies they sell to our SMB. Yeah, the deal size is really small for them. There's a volume growth company. So they invent and they have a certain set of accounts that are big deals. And in that case, it makes perfect sense. So I would never look at HubSpot and say HSPA should be our customer, even though there are investors in terms of all the stuff.

I would say, well, HubSpot is probably not the best customer or the ABM is not the best thing for them because they are the transactional business. They have a ton of small agencies and startups and the agency is how they run and stuff like that. So that so it's not about the size of the company or selling to is the size of the customers they are selling to. OK. On the flip side of it, we have companies and agencies that are like, you know, 50 people agencies.

Right. They are running incredible, even Kampeas because the deal size that they close is upwards of five hundred thousand or a million dollars. So to them, Avios perfect use case because that's what they're doing.

They're trying to surround everybody in the decision-making process. That's a longer sales cycle. The deal sizes are really big. They need to enthrall and they need to do all these things. So it's literally with that's the biggest aha moment. It's not your customer size, it's your customer’s size that really matters.

Got it. OK. So for ABM to walk, you see that the marketing and sales team should work together, but in reality, marketing blames it. It's full of coke and machines and sales blame marketing for the poor quality athletes. So how do you motivate most of these teams to work together? Marketing is wrong. The Thousand percent market is wrong and almost a thousand percent. A. Here's the reason why. In your own audit, you have a sales team.

Yeah. Right. And if in salespeople it's the hardest job in the world, by the way. Like if you're a marketer, if you don't have empathy for sales, then you need to go and actually make a hundred calls and have 90 times, 90 of them actually hung up on you and then it will build your character up sales to the hardest job in the world.

When it comes to technology, part of it's one recognizing that you are more as a salesperson, you every single month. It starts at zero dollars. Zero, right. If you don't meet your quota in most organizations for about two months or three months at Max, you're out. So what sales are challenged with. Is that they don't have the patience on working on a six-month campaign and a lead that actually is not in their quarter in that month.

That is the reason I say marketing is wrong is because the value of marketing is defined by sales. That is the number one thing that upsets me. And I rarely get looks from everybody when I say that because I'm like I'm a marketer.

www.kiosksoftware.com

Does marketing get more budget when the revenue goes up?

But it's true because tell me in your organization when the revenue goes up, does marketing get more budget?

Typically yes, we get it. Yeah. If out loud tell me this. If your sales number goes down. Would marketing get more budget?

Right. Right. So it's tied to marketing and sales is tied to the hip. So you like it or not. This is not an honest philosophical conversation. No. Nada. It is a hundred percent a conversation of truth. The truth is marketing and sales are tighter to her. If you're in B2B and it's one line item in most financial statements. So if you're tied to the hip, your job as a marketer, everyone who's listening to your job as a marketer is to do that incrementally or exponentially grow sales, period.

And if your sales team is not happy with you, you're not doing something right. So the way to go about all that is that and I have shared some of these things in other videos as well and find the two salespeople that you're buddies with, that you go to drinks with at the happy hour with and whatever and help them be wildly successful that month or that quarter. And the way you do that is simply this. You literally go and say, oh, Joe and Sally, give me the list of accounts that you need to close this month to meet your quota.

This quarter meant what they already knew. And a sidebar on that. The reason account-based marketing became such a big deal. It's not for sales. It is for marketers to learn how to do it.

Sales people's title has always been an account executive. They always got their marketing. We never got to give them leads and they like, did you haven't seen an account to work on?

So back to this is if you help Joe and Sally, they give me the 10 or whatever number of accounts you have that's going to help you win and meet your quarter, exceeding your quota this month.

This quarter, you ask them, they will give you that list, no questions asked. Then you generate leads within those accounts. Then you do all those things that we talked about, webinars for those accounts, very specific. Then you go create ebooks for those accounts. Then you do direct mail. Then you do free-market events for those accounts.

They make them super wildly successful. They will go tell the entire organization that, oh, Sanjana just made me super excited, super awesome. Because before I met my current staff, they're going to do everything possible to support you and they're going to tell you the entire organization, the entire CEO is going to come to you and say Sandra, and you do this for my entire sales team.

And that's a beautiful conversation to have right at that time because I like my budget. Instead, I think what we do is we throw a bunch of leaves from all of the places.

So, for example, if you sent all the leads from this webinar to the team without looking at how many of these are actually going to are in their accounts that have, say, zero, people listening to this webinar are part of the deals that are in-flight for your organization. You're wasting their time. It's not that they're not supposed to get those leaves.

So the idea would be like, how can you get the lead in those accounts if leads are one of the metrics for you that they want to close that month, that quarter. That is why. So it's not who's right? Who's wrong on it? Marketers have to do this. Otherwise, I don't know why you want to be marketing and B2B.

I've read your book somewhere. Maybe you miss me, too. So it was a brilliant time. In fact, we use it as a reference. Got that. Ask SBA to start the ABM process now. All right. That's awesome. Thank you. Yeah. So on that note, we are shipping free copies of some Grim's book, I would say it's a must-read for a marketer and someone one of them at a distance to whom we ship. The book said he'll do a video review once he's done reading a book like that.

Thank you so much, because I've been really direct and I'm like, how does this work? And people said you gotta be shameless at asking for reviews because that's how Amazon knows how to recommend to other marketers. So I've been like if you like it really, then please give it a review on Amazon because that's how it goes. Yeah.

What are the key ABM finding policies?

So what are the key ABM findings policy and what's to consider?

One, I think one of the things I didn't answer, part of it is one of those findings is that your budget if you're doing ABM. Most people think this is gonna take more time, so more money and all that stuff. Actually, what I've seen with companies who are doing thousand one to one campaigns, and when I say 1 to 1, I mean 1 ad to one landing page one type of direct mail to different from other than like it is literally one to one kind of thing.

In those cases, even in those cases, the budget has actually gone down, if not stayed the same. And if you really think about it, it makes sense for referral for me, a dirty deal. It's gone through me for a loop but actually makes sense.

So instead of getting less than 1 percent of the leads turning into customers, still getting a thousand leads and get into like, you know, maybe 10 customers who are doing that, if you change the math and saying it's a thousand now you're going after one hundred and you're good and you're converting them at like 25, 30, 40 percent because you're doing all these levels of personalization with them.

You know why after writing to you so you're gonna have to literally cut your budget from that to that half. And then within that, no matter how much personalization you do like, it doesn't it's not going to cost you an arm and a leg because you're not good at all himself. My big finding has been if you're actually truly doing ABM, your budget might actually seem like it's you using less money and more creativity. So it's really interesting. All right.

So we move on to category creation. So if category creation has done right, it can be rewarding and in fact, it can be the ultimate growth strategy. Right. So how do you know if a category correction is a right strategy for your business? And how does one go about creating a category? The big question, Sangin it right like that is one area I love, I love, I live and breathe in that I think that's one conversation. I have had more founders in the last year than anything one.

It's hard and stupid to do that. Like, don't do it if you can't because it's really hard. We've done it and we realize it. But if you can't help yourself like we did that, go do it because it's a lot of fun at the end of the day when you're on the other side of it for us.

Tell our story. And through that, hopefully, people can draw parallels to it. When we came on the scene in 2015, there wasn't anybody talking about cannabis marketing. Yeah, even the thought of cannabis marketing was novel like no, we really thought and we were based in Atlanta. We didn't have a whole bunch of money. We were literally across the street from where we are now. We had like one desk and we were sharing that.

Like two of the founders write, nice to all us, sits outside. That's what I did. So that's what we started in the early days. And what we saw was there are over five, eight thousand companies in Martek and there's no way we can rise above them that have a hundred million dollar plus funding makes no sense. That's just. So our view is that we need to build something as we build a product. We need to create noise.

And the way to create noise is to identify if there is a category of yourself. There is a name that you can give that people would like. Spatt stop and pause and say, what's that right like? That is really good. We tried to interrupt the van tire noise in the Martek space.

And we're fortunate enough to identify this very specific thing like, man, if we actually go off accounts as opposed to leaves, it would change the way companies do business. That became the theme. So we literally started creating like I mean, in our case, I wanted to do a Terminus event.

Nobody would sponsor because nobody would. Nobody knew us. So I said, what if you buy a domain for eight bucks, call flip my funnel and said, Hey, what about flip my funnel? Everybody said, yes. Crazy as it sounds. People want to be part of a community. People want to be part of the movement. They don't want to be part of a product. Companies are still today. If done 10 conferences. But Terminus is a booth just like everybody else.

My keynote does is not about Terminus. It's about the state of marketing and state of sales and where it's going. So all that to say is every week when you think about category building, you have to first identify somebody working on it. And there's no category of one.

So if you were to build a category, you have to uplift all the other competitors and that's on. That might sound crazy. So we invited you to engage with your demand base, all of them. We gave them Mayne's love mainstage level speaking spots at our conference because we needed to make sure that the category existed because we brought in competitors. It brought in the media because they wanted to. Wait a minute. What's going on? Because the media came in.

It became an industry event. Now not. It's an industry event. Now there's a lot more buzz about it. So we literally followed the gospel of ABM and went to different cities all over it with the same set of characters of competitors, influencers and media people in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, all these different places. So bottom line, a couple of things. One, it's extremely hard to do. And if you do it, you have to be very authentic about it and you have to make it community-oriented, which is something I say.

You're not a community, you're simply a commodity. Right. So building a community is a big part of it. You think about Dreamforce. Salesforce created Dreamforce. HubSpot created inbound drift growing happier good gain side created pulse terminals. So you can literally start seeing petrol like these are the six categories that have incurred in the last 15 years.

Yeah. So building a community is a big part of creating a category that's one. And number two, because there is no category of one. You have to figure out a way to bring in competitors. You have to lift them up, which is a really hard thing to do and kind of think about to do. We literally even brought in somebody from Scotland who was doing some like now you do ABM, you don't know yet, but you do. And we brought them to come to speak because we wanted this to be such a big phenomenon that people would talk about it. So category building is hard, no category of ones you need to bring, bring, bring all of your competitors and then create a community that will allow you to get that message out in the world.

So those are the kind of a couple of things to think about. OK. And then I see a lot of sense from the audience. Can I just quickly ask one? Yep. So the first question is from Kostic. He's asking one of the first 30, 60, 90-day activities. Every new CMO should focus and specifically by looking at implementing and one too many ABM how important this cost to revenue a metric.

All right, so the first part, I would scrap the 30, 60, 90-day plan altogether and create a one-word camp-like program, which is customer, learn about your customer, go-to site, visit, spend as much time as you can, especially in the first 30 days with customers where you get to know them, see them. We started a program here called Customer Flash, which means every six weeks I bring in a customer, fly them in red carpet, sweat and do an all-hands with them with the entire company where the entire company gets to see who looks up.

Customers are what they care about, who they look like, what they talk about, what matters to them. So customer, customer, customer like you, you make that your focus. You'll do really well as a CMO or any job. It really doesn't matter.

What is the second question on that when looking at implementing one too many ABM how important this cost to revenue is a metric. If you are truly doing ABM and regard it as a one to one or one too many, the cost of your cost of acquisition will go up, but your cost revenue will go down. So think about it this way when you get leads today, you just say give me leads that are interested in this thing and do like 30 bucks, 50 bucks, 80 bucks, but you get thousands of them.

So your cost of acquisition is law in ABM because you're going to go not after a thousand, you're going to go after 50 or hundred, your cost of acquisition because you need to figure out if they have the right intent data. You have the right account. We have the right people in those accounts at your cost of acquisition that might go up. But because your cost revenue, because your conversion rate from that customer to actually truly becoming the customer is going to be much higher.

Your cost of record, the revenue is going to be so much more much better. So I would look at it from that perspective. Constant acquisition for sure will go up.

All right. And the explicit question is from Anoush asking. I see you just said a false positive. I posted the margin agencies and companies who are in Legian business who sort of top up the fund and in some cases lead nurturing were some challenges for CMO organizations. I think it's a very negative thing for organizations. Just to state itself should tell us that there is something wrong with it. So is lead by itself wrong?

No. The lead word is wrong. Every person who attends this webinar is not a lead for a forum for your business. So what would the mistake most companies have done is take every single person and dumped them into the same buckets and mixed it up with everything they got and said You're a salesperson. And that's why salesperson's don't work on them, because not everybody is qualified. Right? So a lead the word is wrong. Lead generation doesn't mean an actual lead and actual lead. If you really go back to the definition of a thesaurus on that one lead is someone you think that there's a potential for this person to buy from you.

They are qualified, use the band criteria, all those kinds of things. Right. So if you don't have that, then you're literally setting your organization for failure. I think the stacks that are horrific on the amount of money organizations waste on disqualifying leaks is ridiculous.

Disqualifying, not qualifying this disqualified because they're not the right thing. So imagine this, you do this, legislate the spending out, you get a lead and not the right lead for your business, but you still give it to a sales team. The sales team takes time. Does 7, 8, 9 touches. Now, they have spent two weeks on that particular set of people. They're not the right people. Then they look at them. There's a pipeline meeting.

There's a revenue meeting that is to follow up. Maybe you direct me. All you do all these things, your wasted time and money and energy, and resources to drive business. So that is really the reason why lead generation is bad.

Now, if you do lead generation, the right accounts that matter. That's really, I think, a legion reason. If I were in the lead generation business today, I would change that and say lead generation in accounts that matter to you. That's the business idea.

The next question is from Matt. He's asking, How do you think about communicating the importance of marketing activities that don't result in a lead, for instance, saturating a target account with native video content? For a target account and saturating a target account with native video content.

I don't know if you can truly do that because when you think of an account. There's not one person in that account, and I cannot by definition mean that there are multiple people in that account. So you are.

If a true account was marketing it would mean different personas within that account are now getting different messages through your video content or advertising or record or whatever.

So, for example, let's say you're selling I.T. services to a company, right? I.T. product. Your IT people might be interested in knowing that this is a really, really good product and they might be interested in the bits and feeds and all that information. Your message to them is different. Your CFO is probably going to care about how they are, the Gartner magic quarter. So is it that's a different message to them, right? There's a video conference video or anything you do will be different. Your CEO might want to know that. Oh, my goodness.

All of our competitors are using them. They must be good. Like I want to get more information. So if you're truly doing ABM, you would make sure that different personas are getting different messages with different ideas about the same product and you will talk to them much different in that process. I don't know if you can truly saturate an account because today I don't know if many companies are doing it.

All right. So the next question, this by room is IBM ideas. Stopped at the no teams. Aaron, I'd think. By the way, that's my dad's name, too. So that's a cool name.

And so I think if I don't I don't know many organizations that have marketing and no sales in a B2B space because your job is too incremental exponentially sales. So I'm thinking that you probably are still in the already stage trying to create a product-market fit more your probably your deal size. I'm not that big. So if any of those are true, this is a different play for you because you're not I don't know. I don't think APM is right now the best thing yet because IBM is like, you got to know your target audience.

And you got to know what the sales cycle looks like for it. You have to know that these are the right customers. You can serve the best and they will benefit from it. If the answers to any of those questions are no, then it's not right for you to figure out the market first before you can actually spend so much more time on your next business.

Which medium works better in ABM, is its navigator webinars or seminars?

That's a great question. What's the name now will be nubby. I mean, has it been the Tory who runs our ABM program?

He actually educated me on this a few weeks ago. I own this thought that the more you do, the better it is with the same account. And as he is in the weeds running the program, I'm just a talker. He's the one who actually is doing things like reprograms and ABM, hundreds and hundreds of calculations and all that stuff. Incredible guy.

Did he educate me as he ran preambles? Like it really doesn't matter. It's literally you could do whatever you're good at and you shouldn't focus on that. Not every company is good at events. So you should do what you're really good at.

But he said what we do and what has work now has been, let's say you're going after manufacturing vertical, you start running ads because typically ads are super cheap because if you have a target list of accounts and going after it and if you're doing that and you get it on Google and LinkedIn and Facebook or you are all those down things when you do that and if you start engaging, lets you go after 50 accounts and lets you start seeing 10 of them showing signals that they're interested in and by clicking the ad or engaging or coming to your website and you should be able to see all those with all the tech out there, then for the 10 accounts you start adding different layers and beyond advertising, you change the advertising.

But now you can have the salespeople start calling these accounts because they have shown interest in it. You can also start doing it, doing maybe it based on where they are, ebooks and webinars and whatnot within those 10 accounts. Let's say five or further showing more interest. Now you actually start doing in addition direct mail and stuff because it makes sense to not spend more money and time with those because they have self-identified in that journey.

So if you all believe that 70 to 90 percent of the journey that companies, if they do it online and people are only taking it before they talk to your salesperson, then I think like a marketer, our job is in that journey to increase the level of engagement as they come closer to actually having a conversation with you. So it's not one thing that is that we have found that works better. It's always as they come closer and they get to know you more.

You actually start spending more on that, which is one of the reasons we haven't. The book is like some accounts. You have to greet them with champagne and other sparkling water. Not all accounts are the same. If you did everything for every account, there is no unique proposition for them.

So we have one more question about how effective ABM will be when it comes to marketing ideas and data. It's. It depends on the same three questions. What is your deal size? How many people are in the process and what does your sales cycle look like in terms of timeframe?

So if all of those things have deal sizes big at least fifty thousand dollars or more, or if the sales cycle is like three to six months or more, if any of those answers are so true, then it actually doesn't really matter what field you're talking about.

The next question is,

What's the cheapest way to get indent data besides ad campaigns or content marketing?

I think we use Bambara data to be like straight up and chain. We found that their data is the best data that we have got.

We also did a partnership with G2 data that started to do in 10 data due to is really, really phenomenal. I love that because that's like if somebody is looking at your grid and figuring out if your product is right or not, they are ready to buy from you or your competitor. You need to be on them. So G2 in 10 is getting really good. Bambara and 10 are really good because both of them internally and for our customers, we recommend that.

So that's where the technology is right now. All right. Next, Can you show examples of ABM campaigns that have impacted the pipeline in the same month? Examples. Well, I'll give you an example of it, say we talked about Thomson Reuters. It happens for us are actually just talking with Terminus 40 percent. If I'm not mistaken, maybe all but a few percentage points, 40 percent of the deals that we closed within the quarter are sourced within the quarter.

That makes sense. Like because we have such a high level of personalization, we know at least 40 percent literally is going to close within the quarter that we are sourcing within the quarter. Companies like Maser G and Promoter, both of them are mentioned in the company in the book. They are all running very targeted campaigns and they actually promote risk. As you might remember, this is from the book. Their graphic actually dropped by 70 percent when they started doing ABN.

And the reason it dropped is because they were not getting bad traffic any more. They only were getting traffic from the right accounts. So their pipeline and revenue increased within a month, within a quarter, but their overall traffic actually went down, goes back to the vanity metrics leaves and traffic to the website. Those things are not necessarily going to drive business. What's going to drive businesses, actual business outcomes on it. So I think the majority if I think about Macer, do promote all these companies ourselves are actually seeing more in quarter deals because of the level of personalization they're doing.

All right. Again, from should the. Can you share some benchmarks with a good and performing a B program. Good at Royesh. Good employer. I think we just shared like in a good another would be like a snowflake.

We talked about that and it's in the book as well, which is one to one day. I think they're like the best campaign that I've ever seen. If you want to really look at where an auction could be a year or two years from now, not today starting today. Don't think you could do that because that would make you like your mind might blow up. Right. Like it's not something. But it's a really inspiring one because they're literally doing one to one campaign, one ad, one message, different personas, one landing page, nothing to fill out there because they already know who's coming to the website, to the landing page or the right people from the right accounts.

Then retargeting to them, direct mail to them, video to them. So they're doing everything for that account because it's a million-dollar account. All right. So best in class. I've seen the worst. Oh, gosh. I think all over the place one week. I'm a big fan of this framework. Again, it's something that we talk about all the time, which is the team framework. Target engaged activity measure team and Target, engage, activate and measure.

The worst performing ABM companies are those who actually skip a step in this process. Okay. If you don't know who you're going after, the rest doesn't matter how good your marketing is. So a lot of times that's where majority companies do. We're throwing all these amazing activities out there, but it's not reaching the right people. So it's a waste. That's why they let the 1 percent stat exist. So figured out the target list of it.

The worst thing we did at Terminus when we started doing ABM marketing came over the list. Guess what? No buy-in from sales. SALES did not follow up. Nothing happened. All right. We said, all right, fine sales. You come up with the list failed. Why? Because sales said we want to close Nike and added as we'd like.

Not even in our tab. Like it makes no sense. Failed third time. We actually sat down in a room like a team, like adults should not like to give adults should and actually came off the list together. And when that target list was clear, everybody was on it. Right.

Whenever there was engagement from any of the target account marketing, allergic sales, sales were all over its target list. Number one, if they don't do it, companies will fail, engage, engage people on their terms as we talked about the Tory example, your engagement level increases as the deal gets closer to the finish line. Activating your sales team is by far the most important thing. If you don't do that, magically deals are not gonna happen.

So sales team activation where you alert them for every account, every deal that's going on because you know and agree on that and then measure, which is really not you're not measuring leads, you're measuring lead in an account, engagement in an account. Imagine going to join Sallyanne saying, hey, you're three accounts. They're all on fire right now. They have engagement. They will be all over it.

Yeah. So one last question for me.

What do you think the future of marketing is going to look like?

Oh, I was literally working this morning and a new talk track, and I'm calling it marketing focused business outcomes. So, I really think the future and we all are at the forefront of it.

Everybody is listening to it. I think they're here. And so I'm assuming that you all are the forefront of trying to figure out and be the best marketer you can. And in that sense, I think I can. I love to challenge everybody to think about what are your business outcomes? What does that look like? So if you're a demand generation person, don't hide behind leaves and traffic. Look at appointments and say my metric is the number of appointments for sales things.

Right. That changes the game. It will change the way you think about it. Don't hide behind. If you're a social CEO kind of person, they'll look at how many impressions you're getting on that kind of stuff. Look at all the people whose team did a fantastic job of reaching out and engaging with the right people on LinkedIn and all these people and saying recruiting opportunities out of it. Let's say you are a product marketing person or something listening to these great customer stories that real, authentic, raw, bring customers in the office show then terror organization what it looks like.

Talk about their stories, not your story. Be the guide. So I think there is an opportunity for all of us to think about business outcomes no matter what role we play in marketing today.

We could come up with different ideas. What is your favorite ABM frame? Look outside Terminus.

I mean, if there was, I would have put it in the team framework is truly, truly my favorite one.

But if I was just talking about just frameworks, I'll just go off the rails on this one, not ABM framework for. Because that let me just answer that quickly. ABM framework. I think a team is really a good framework because it gets people to work as a team. The other one is something that we have talked about with Peter when he was a CMO here. You talked about fitt intent and engagement, fit and dentin engagement. Find the right accounts that are fed fine if their intent and start engaging with them.

So I think both of those frameworks are really, really inspiring outside of the ABM framework. I like I posted something on LinkedIn yesterday that we all think our world is as hard work. Like we got to just work grind every single day to make things work. But the reality is it's actually a whole bunch of things. So check out that post because I think it identifies the challenge for us as marketers. If you think your whole world is about leaves or the whole world is about how you're doing it Bandz, you're doing direct mail advertising, doing all these things.

But if it's not pulled together as a strategy, you're going to fail. So think about all of this. The hub and spoke model is really what we need to do as marketers.

]]>http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/how-to-lead-like-a-modern-cmo-webinar/feed/0Limitless Podcasts- Ep 9: How to develop a winning sales strategy Ft. Kent Hollandhttp://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/limitless-webinar-blog-ft-kent-holland-how-to-develop-a-winning-sales-strategy/
http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/limitless-webinar-blog-ft-kent-holland-how-to-develop-a-winning-sales-strategy/#respondMon, 06 Apr 2020 17:40:49 +0000http://ec2-107-23-194-159.compute-1.amazonaws.com/blog/?p=3327Kent Holland leads Copper’s Global Sales Organization. Prior to Copper, Kent was a business development leader at Box, helped drive new product launches and sales strategy at LinkedIn, and started his career in the strategy and operations consulting practice at Deloitte. Kent was featured on our Limitless webinar series on February 11 2020, at 11 […]

]]>Kent Holland leads Copper’s Global Sales Organization. Prior to Copper, Kent was a business development leader at Box, helped drive new product launches and sales strategy at LinkedIn, and started his career in the strategy and operations consulting practice at Deloitte.

Kent was featured on our Limitless webinar series on February 11 2020, at 11 AM EST. He had some really great insights to be shared on developing winning sales strategies.

]]>http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/limitless-webinar-blog-ft-kent-holland-how-to-develop-a-winning-sales-strategy/feed/0How to leverage LinkedIn for social sellinghttp://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/limitless-podcasts-ep-8-how-to-leverage-linkedin-for-social-selling-ft-timothy-hughes/
http://blog.hippovideo.io/blog/limitless-podcasts-ep-8-how-to-leverage-linkedin-for-social-selling-ft-timothy-hughes/#respondTue, 31 Mar 2020 10:30:51 +0000http://ec2-107-23-194-159.compute-1.amazonaws.com/blog/?p=3226Wanna know what is Social Selling and how it helps in today’s sales world? Tim Hughes is a social selling innovator and pioneer and has been listed by Forbes as one of the ‘Top 100 Social Sellers’ globally. Tim was involved in rolling out one of the most advanced social selling programmes across 2,000 salespeople […]

]]> Wanna know what is Social Selling and how it helps in today’s sales world?

Tim Hughes is a social selling innovator and pioneer and has been listed by Forbes as one of the ‘Top 100 Social Sellers’ globally. Tim was involved in rolling out one of the most advanced social selling programmes across 2,000 salespeople in Western Europe. He currently provides training and coaching on social selling through The Social Selling Network thesocialsellingnetwork.com

Featuring,

Timothy Hughes, CEO and Co-founder, DLA ignite. (Speaker)

Sanjana Murali, Product Marketer at Hippo Video. (Host)

Listen to the Podcast here

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Question: You have been in the sales industry for 15 years. So we are in 2020 now. Where do you see the promise for social selling?

Tim: I think that the modern buyer and ourselves now are pretty bored with the interruptions that we get from people, which is kind of the way that we’ve marketed since about 1930, which is where we arrive and we interrupt somebody and immediately tell them about what we do. And that’s the same for advertising or calling or email. And we’re making that transition away from that to permission, right. Permission-based marketing where we actually connect with people. And we have conversations with them on social media.

Social Selling

Tim: Social selling is really the change that we’ve had to make to impact on the modern buyer. The changes in what we do from a sales and marketing perspective. People are not interested in being interrupted and what they want to do. What we can now do with social selling is that we build relationships with people, have conversations with people on social media and by building relationships and having conversations, ultimately we can sell things.

Do’s and Don’ts of Social Selling

Question: Can you tell us about what is Social Selling and what’s not Social Selling?

Tim: You may have used social where someone turns up and immediately pitches to you. That’s no different from what we’ve been doing before. It’s just an interruption and a broadcast on social media. It’s like a cold call on a social network. What we need to do is actually build relationships with people. Our buyers are looking for experts and when they do that, we need to make sure that we’re looking like an expert on social media otherwise they’ll by-pass and just see us as a spammer.

Question: Do you have to build a personal brand for yourself?

Tim: Yes, I’m the person at the term personal brand can sound a little bit difficult to create. Ultimately, if we think ourselves, all of us as shop windows and if you walk down a set of shops and look in the window and there’s nothing there, then you’ll just walk on by. What you need to do is, you need to set out your way as a shop window. And for people to go that looks interesting and fit for people then too.

When I actually talk to you about what you do, you know that that’s it. The three things that you need to have for two to four social standing. One is you need to have a personal brand, which is a shop window to the world. Social media is open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. And what you need to do is you need to present yourself to the world on who you are, your why and what you do.

That’s very different from, say, somebody that will put out their CV because you’re not interested in that as a buyer. The second thing you need is a network. So most people on Linked-In have connections with people who are ex-employees and recruiters. And that’s no use for you. If you want to sell a market. So what you need to do is take your territory or the people that you want to sell to lift those up on social media.

And that requires you to connect with people and build relationships with people on social media. The third thing you need is content. And the reason why you need content is it shows that you’re an expert in what you do. It’s no different from you going from meeting with a client and you have to explain what it is that you are, why you. The evidence of why you are there and why that you can help them. And what you need to do is you need to make sure that you have that on social media just as much as you may talk about it at that meeting.

Question: People don’t want to listen to below the power line kind of people. So you’ll have to appear like a decision-maker. You have to be super professional with the photos that you use. How do you see that?

Tim: I wouldn’t necessarily say you need to contact all senior people. One of the things that we teach people is to connect on social media is that when you get a connection. One of the things that you’ll look at is the mutual connections that you have. If someone senior sees that you’re not connected to other people within the company, you may not get that connection request accepted.

Generally what we suggest is, If you’re going to connect to someone senior, you need to connect to probably 10 people underneath that person as well. So when they look at you, they go, oh, they know Steve and they know Sanjeev and who works for me, then they must be a good person.

Question: As much of the B2B buying process continues to move online. Social networks have become fundamental to the success of sales teams. What’s the value of social selling when it comes to it?

Tim: Well, we now pretty much see social selling as the way to sell. The feedback I get is that co-called just doesn’t work anymore. Certainly in Europe, after GDP got implemented in 2018, the ability to actually get through to people, the new version of IRS 13 now actually blocks, you can actually block people calling you. It goes straight through to voicemail. And I believe that’s the same on Android as well.

So, your ability to get through to people is being blocked by both technologies and by legislation. And what we’re seeing is that the data, the output of cold calling and email basically getting less. And what we’re saying to people is now is the time to make the jump to actually invest in social, because at some point it will get to zero. What you need to do is actually make the change and shift your budget to social now rather than actually wait for it to go to zero.

Question: Who in the company owns social selling, is it the sales team or the marketing game or is it implemented holistically across the sales and marketing teams?

Tim: It’s a good question. I’d actually say that social selling is generally owned by sales. Sometimes by marketing teams too. And at the end of the day, it’s empowerment. It’s not about people doing it for you, it’s the empowerment of you to do it yourself. So it’s actually learning social sales means that you need to learn a new skill. And it also means that you need to change certain habits because you’re going to be doing things differently than the way that you’ve been working before.

But actually the way that you use social, which is to have a personal brand, have a strong network and create content, can actually be used right across the business. And one of the things we teach organizations is whether you’re in sales, marketing, human resources, procurement. At the end of the day, one of the things that you need to be doing is actually sharing your culture out to people. And you do that because you want to sell things because you want to employ people, you want to get certain suppliers.

Question: Every sales professional and marketing professional have started to realize the importance of building a brand for themselves on LinkedIn or any other social platform. So what’s the right way to leverage our professional brand?

Tim: Buyers are looking for people who are an expert. It’s always been the case. If you look at the days before social media, you go to a meeting and you’d immediately say, I’ve been in this market place for 15 years. This is evidence of why you should talk to me and that should be on someone’s LinkedIn profile. So if you read my LinkedIn profile and I recommend that people go to my LinkedIn profile, what you’ll see is not I’m not going to be telling you about my company and my products because you’re not interested in what you’re, what you want to do first and foremost is to build a relationship with me, which is to understand who I am.

And that’s about understanding why. So if you read my summary title on my LinkedIn profile, it’s not a list of products and services of DLA Ignite’s. it’s good to give you a view about who I am. My belief systems and who I am. It’s only when you get to talk about the company that we actually talk about what we do. And at that point, you should have invested quite a lot of time in my profile.

It’s about pulling people in. If you look at my summary title, it’s quite different. Most people say that they’ve never seen anything like it before and it immediately creates conversation, which is, what this is about. And the summaries of, as I say, about my belief system. And then we talk about the company later.

Question: When there’s something creative in the form of a story that is written there, people can also relate to that and begin conversations. Is that right?

Tim: Yes. Probably the best way to describe it is to say it’s written as a lack of storytelling in a way that I talk about my career history. I started at the bottom. My first job was when I worked in a restaurant washing up right through to what I do now. And it works as a story. I have people coming to me and I’ve read the whole lot.

It’s not about now if I sit in front of you and say, oh, yes, I did this job five years ago and these are my up, these were my objectives. You wouldn’t be interested in what you would expect me to say as I did this job. This is what I got out of it. These are the things that I learnt, and that’s what we teach people to do on their LinkedIn profile. So it becomes like a story.

And again, it’s about the person. So rather than it being a flat screen as this is what I am. It’s like a 3D image of ourselves. On social media, that enables people to really understand the person and actually get to know them before we even have a conversation and exchange connection requests.

And that’s the point, We’re creating a piece of content that will go out through our networks and the people and it will showcase you and it showcases me. That’s what we’re one of the things that we’re trying to do. People then can actually see who we are and they go, well, I don’t like him, which is fine. Not everybody may like me or they may go. When I sort out my social setting, I’m gonna give to musicals. And that’s the point.

Building Connections

Question: When it comes to building a brand on a social platform. The first thing that comes to mind is building connections. So how do we leverage the existing connections that we have to get introduced?

Tim: One of the things that you could do is if you were looking like an expert. You have a personal brand and you’re creating content, which is both insights from an educational so not corporate content, which says we’re wonderful with the best when we’re a market leader because everybody says that’s. Yeah. BMW says it’s the ultimate driving machine and I don’t think Ferrari would agree with that. We’re trying to get people to come to our profile and then have this conversation. And by sending out connection requests, we can do so.

There’s nothing wrong with actually sending connection requests to people that we don’t know because there’s nothing wrong in having a network where you’re learning from people. So I publish content. Therefore, If you’re interested in social selling, connect with me. And what you’ll do is you’ll learn about social selling or follow me and you’ll learn about social selling. I try to connect all the people that I ultimately want to sell to.

And it’s about going out, connecting with people and then having conversations and then seeing your profile and who you are and your beliefs. I want to connect with that person or I’m happy to refer to that person.

Question: How do we go about finding the right connections on social?

Tim: I have a number of target account companies that I will target. And then I look at the people that I generally sell to people who are sales leaders and marketing leaders and I will basically connect to those people in those organizations. What I would say is that if you don’t invest in your LinkedIn profile and you look like a spammer, then you won’t get people connecting to you. We had a company we did some work for where they said that they connected to 250 people and nobody did anything and they didn’t do anything because the people that we are sending the connection requests look like spammers.

Question: Now that we have everything set up our journey towards building our personal brand, how can the sales and marketing team go about operationalizing social selling?

Tim: One of the things that you need to do is making sure that you’re building into people’s day to day routine. Quite often what happens is that people will want to do something. But in our daily lives, we’re busy and the only thing that we can usually do is to pick up something new is to actually let something go. So what I would say is that you need to find time for social selling.

We have people that come to us and say, you know, I’ve spent all morning making cocoa. Well, I got nothing from it. And then they said, I don’t have time for social selling. It’s like, well, why don’t you drop the cold calling and spend the time that you’re doing the prospecting and cold calling social selling instead. And I spend an hour a day doing prospecting.

Creating content is prospecting for me as well. And so, this is about building social and the time for it into our daily lives. Everybody that we teach usually will immediately take at least 30 minutes in a day, every day to do something that social selling related. And they’re these people that get the best results. We actually teach people how to create a content factory, which also helps as well, because then if anybody looks at the people who work for daylight daily at night, you will see that there’s a lot of content created because they are everybody who wants a deal, a light delay, ignite understands the value of creating the content, but also what it means is that we share the content as well, and creating a content factory enables you to scale the social setting across an organization or cross across the globe as much as you can.

Question: Do you have to bring in social selling as a routine in your everyday work?

Tim: Yes, I got up this morning and I wrote some and read a couple of blogs. Yesterday, we ran a new product for human resources. So the guy that’s heading up, he and I basically spent the day creating content. He said jobs now have all that content. He’s now got enough content for him to put out until June. So it isn’t a good couple of months where we took videos and stuff.

So, creating content is all part of the prospecting process as well as connecting with people, talking to people. But you do need to spend time and block time out in your diary to do that.

Question: What’s your view on this? Do you think social media has changed the way we do cold calling?

Tim: It has changed the world. Social media has changed society. If you look at certainly in the U.K., Europe and the US, you turn on the news, somebody tweeted something or whatever. We’re having discussions about what’s going on social media. While you may not like that, it’s the way that we live today and social selling changed business even from something very simple where when you contacted me, I looked you up on social media and we then had a discussion on social and then we took that off social and we had an email conversation.

Then we had a call. So the key thing for people is, it doesn’t mean that social selling is everything that takes place on social. But if I get a conversation with somebody on social, I will immediately take it off social and take it onto having something like a zoom call.

But the thing is, the way that we live and the way that we work now is that social media has changed everything. People need to get with the program and understand that they need to start teaching people how to do social because, in fact, we find most of the people in all organizations are doing something on social media. And one of the things that people try and do is actually block it. They say we can’t control it.

What they need to be doing is training people. They need to be explaining people about what is good behaviour and what is a bad behaviour as we do with diversity, inclusion, sexual harassment, health and safety. We teach people what good behaviour is and bad behaviours are. And we need to be doing that with social media as well.

Case Study on Social Selling

Question: Do you have some case studies or social selling success stories from enterprise companies?

Tim: Yeah, there’s a case study on my YouTube channel on Steve Rafferty from Reinke Central, a 20-25 minute interview where we talk about the benefits they have, both in terms of the prospecting and the business that they’ve closed through using social as well. And also, one of the things that they’ve been using it for is recruitment. Steve needs to get some new salespeople. So he wrote a blog and he saved something like four hundred and fifty thousand pounds worth of recruitment fees just by putting a blog up.

That’s just an example of how you can use content, not just within the sales process. And I mean, we’ve got a number of cases to this. Generally what we’re finding is that most people can get one lead or meeting a week by using social media. So if you have four weeks in a month, that’s four leads and meetings. If you have a 1 in 4 wins. Then you should be winning an additional 10 deals a year on the basis.

And nothing happens in January, December and August. People should be getting an additional 30% of incremental revenue and being able to shorten the sales cycle by something like 40%. And we find that happens in every store, every time we run the program. It’s repeatable and predictable. I have written a book based on this as well and it’s available on Amazon Wordly.

Question: What does the future of social selling hold for B2B companies?

Tim: It’s a really good question. I think social is not going away. Social can transform the whole of an organization, not just sales. We launched a social HR program last September, which is where we remained the human resources department in a social age. We’ve just signed our first contract for social marketing, which is where we’re redefining marketing in a social age.

And we believe that therefore, social can transform an organization from end to end, whether it’s sales, marketing, human resources and procurement. Social can be used across the whole of the business. It’s about people in the process. It’s not about technology, it’s about people and the process. And what we’re seeing now is this transformation taking place. And people announced it now and are ready for it. And most people who work for organizations actually expect it.

Role of Videos in Social Selling

Question: Do you and your team use videos in your business activities and what role does it play?

Tim: Video is really important. We use the written word and we use videos. What you’re doing when you create content is that you need to be accessible to everybody that might want to buy from you and we have to be realistic that some people don’t read and that sometimes actually having a video and a podcast can help. Some people listen to podcasts when commuting. And if you’re driving, you can’t read. So people consume content in different formats. And we see the videos are really important.

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